Five tips to speed up your Mac

Boost your Mac's performance and reclaim hard-drive space with this handful of tips.

The only place I like to see a beach ball is in a beach or in a stadium during a baseball game or a concert. The only place that one likes least to see a beach ball is on my aging MacBook Pro, where the rotating beach ball has become a completely familiar sight. If your Mac has become frustrating slowly, there are several ways to speed it up.

Before you engage in maintenance, I urge you to take care and save your data. For Mac, it's easy: enter an external drive and run Time Machine. With the drive of your newly saved Mac, you can proceed.

1. Replace your Mac hard drive with an SSD

Moving from a traditional hard drive to a hard drive (SSD) is the best thing you can do to improve the performance of an aging MacBook. Follow the instructions of Sharon Profis on how to improve your MacBook Pro with an SSD. You will be shocked not only at the ease of the task, but also at the tremendous impact it has on performance.

I just performed the maneuver myself, replacing the 500GB hard drive of my MacBook Pro of the time 2011 with the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB. The Samsung SSD and a USB cable kit SATA to m ' cost just north of $ 200 on Amazon. And the whole process took less than an hour (not counting the half day needed to clone the hard drive from my MacBook to the SSD).

Truly, the hardest part of everything was to track down a 6T size torx head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place.

2. Add more memory (RAM)

While your MacBook is open to replace its hard drive, take the opportunity to add more memory. Like replacing a hard drive, adding more memory is a simple and simple process.

First, you need to find the right type of memory for your specific MacBook model. The brand does not matter, make sure you buy the right amount, type and speed. Apple has a convenient support page that shows the memory specifications for a variety of models, as well as an illustrated guide to replace the memory.

In my case, my MacBook Pro early 2011 has two DIMM slots, each of which is occupied by a 2 GB module. Since I do not have free slot machines, it will be necessary to replace these two modules by two modules of 4 GB I need DDR3 memory with a speed of 1333 MHz.

After finding the right RAM for your MacBook, follow the photos below to install the new memory.

3. Clean your Mac's hard drive

Sometimes all your MacBook needs are a data cleanup. Over the years, you've probably cluttered your Mac with files and applications that you no longer need or need.

Uninstall old Mac applications

To start, let's look at the Applications and downloads folder. If there are applications out there, you can not remember the installation, chances are you can live without them. Move them to the Recycle Bin to recover hard disk space.

There are files associated with each application that you install, and they are left behind when you simply move an application to the Trash. Because Mac OS X does not have an integrated uninstaller, AppZapper can uninstall applications and associated files. It's free for the first five zaps, after which you'll have to pay $ 12.95.

Clean the applications you're still using

Then, clean up the applications you keep. When you install an application on your Mac, the software comes as part of a package of files, including permissions that tell OS X which users can do things with specific files.

Over time, these permissions can be changed, resulting in a delay, freeze, or crash of your Mac. Repairing these disk permissions, in the most basic terms, is equivalent to redesigning and reorganizing these permissions so that they return to their place. To answer this, OS X has an integrated tool called Disk Utility that does the trick.

Read my previous publication on how to repair disk permissions for a step-by-step guide.

Find out which applications use most resources

If your Mac acts as if it is a nap every day, when you are at the top of multitasking, there is a simple way to see which of your open applications use most system resources. Open the activity monitor.

The numbers vary constantly, but they show you the amount of CPU and memory resources each application uses. After watching the activity monitor for a while this morning, I see that Firefox normally requires more CPU resources and more than triple memory resources. It may be time for me to drop Firefox and use Chrome exclusively. Also, I found that the slow iTunes was not the source of the resources I thought I was. My apologies, iTunes.

Delete large unused files

Now that you have paid some attention to your applications, it's time to look at the files that clog your drive. You can use the Finder to search for huge files. To do this, open Finder and select the volume that you want to search. Next, select File> Find (or press Command-F). Click the Genre drop-down menu and choose Other. When the Select Search Attribute window opens, select the File size check box, clear all other fields, and then click OK. Change the "equal" drop-down menu option to "is greater than", then change KB to MB. Enter a minimum file size, E.g., 100 MB. You can then delete all files that appear on the list that you no longer need - or at least move them to an external drive.

4. Minimize connection elements

If your Mac is slow to start, there may be too many applications on startup. It is likely that you will never leave them on the boat - they run by default.

Go to System Preferences> Users and Groups, and then click the Connections tab to display a list of the applications that are opened when you start your Mac.

Select applications that you do not want to open at startup, and click the minus sign button under the application list.

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5. Stay informed with OS X

Apple launches new versions of OS X as free upgrades, so there is no reason not to stay up-to-date. New versions of OS X include performance enhancements and security enhancements for your Mac to run smoothly and securely.

Periodically log on to the Mac App Store Updates for OS X Updates tab, and do not ignore any updates that are ready to be installed.