What to do when your computer is too slow

It happens to any Mac user sooner or later. The virtual gears of your computer begin to function as if they were working in a tapioca pudding tank. No matter what you're trying to do, your Mac moves at a pace that could turn a snail. But before you load your Mac into an Apple Genius bar, you try these patches.

Restart your Mac

One of the easiest steps you can take is also one of the most effective. Restarting your Mac reduces the slowdown because it allows the background processes to quit, upload the memory, and generally allow you to start.

Check your Internet connection

For many Mac users, a slow Internet connection is synonymous with a slow computer. This is because almost everything they do from surfing the Internet to check emails requires internet access. If your online business seems to move, improving your connection can solve your problem.

Check Network Preferences: Do you see a rotating ball in Safari when you try to load web pages? It can be difficult to determine whether pages have an unusually long time to load or if your connection is actually broken. Select Apple menu> System Settings and select Network. Click Help, click Diagnostics, select your connection type, and then click Next to run the tests. If a problem occurs, follow the advice suggested by the network diagnostic tool to deal with it.

Are you connected to the Internet? Here Network Diagnostics brings good news.

Check your speed: If you can load the page, go to a website that tests Internet connectivity speeds. Since I use the Comcast internet service, I go to the Comcast Speedtest. Other options are Speedtest.net and TestMySpeed.com.

You probably pay for some download and download speeds, check your bill or check with your ISP to see what these speeds are. If you see a slowdown, call your ISP and ask if you have any common problems that could affect you. If this is the case, you need to wait for someone else to correct the problem. Alternatively, your ISP may offer to check your modem connection via remote commands and possibly repair them.

Test all your Macs: If you have more than one Mac, test the Internet speed at all. If the slowdown occurs on a single machine, the problem probably comes from this Mac. For example, it can have an unusually low Wi-Fi connection. If so, you can be able to do things by turning Wi-Fi on and then back again. To do this, go to the Wi-Fi menu in the menu bar and select Disable WLAN. Wait a few seconds and then turn it back on.

Disconnect and restore the modem: Disconnect the Internet modem and wait approximately 10 seconds. Back to. If you have a separate router, Such as an AirPort Extreme, do the same with the router. Wait until everything is restarted. Check your speed again.

Free space

To work at a decent pace, OS X must have enough free space on your boot drive. If the available disk space of your Mac is reduced to almost zero, the system becomes very slow (as I understood it in a bugs & fixes column).

Check disk usage with Activity Monitor: One way to check the free space on your Mac is to go to the Activity Monitor (supplied with OS X in the Applications / Utilities folder). Click the Disk Usage tab below. My general rule is that a system is at least 10 GB (10% of the player's capacity, whichever is less). If free space on your Mac drops below this threshold, you must delete an additional space.

Search for large files: A simple way to find large files that you no longer need is to use Spotlight. In the Finder, click Command-F, click the plus sign (+), click the Genre pop-up menu, and choose Other. Select File Size from the resulting list, and then click OK. Configure the criterion to read the file size is greater than 500 MB. If no consequence appears when you perform this search, select a smaller file size and try again. Or try a utility like $ 13 Id-Design WhatSize. Delete all files you no longer need.

Removing cache and log files: Cache files, such as: In the / Library / Caches folder, your Mac will run faster. If you delete them as a quick fix, your system will rebuild them later. Protocol files, Such as the / Library / Logs folder, you can track events on your Mac, For example, past event reports. Most users never view these files, so you can probably remove them without damaging consequences.

The easiest way to clean your cache and log files is using a utility like Onyx from the Titanium software (donated). After you run Onyx, go to the Cleanup tab. To begin, delete only the items in the Users and Logs section.

It is possible that a bug, such as a "runaway" log file, can cause your drive to fill much faster than it should. If your free space is returned almost immediately after deleting the files, an error of this type can be the culprit; If your Mac has this symptom, check the web for possible solutions.

Check the processor usage

If the CPU on your Mac is overwhelmed by an application, anything that can occur on your system can slow down.

Start Activity Monitor and select My Processes from the context menu at the top of the window. Then, click the% CPU column to sort by this criterion.

Activity Monitor Disk Usage list, sorted by '% CPU'; Disk storage statistics appear below.

If an application constantly stays on or near the top of the% CPU list, and especially if it represents too high a percentage of the workload of the CPU (probably slightly more than 50 percent and certainly slightly more than 80 percent), this application can Peeling works. To find out, select the application and click the Quit Quit button.

By far, the most likely source of problems is the Apple Safari (and specifically a web page that uses Flash). If the web pages load extremely slowly and the% CPU for Safari and / or Web Safari content remains high, it is time to take action.

To reduce the chance of a Safari slowdown, reduce the number of webpages that you have opened at the same time. You can also try using Google Chrome: If a Chrome tab is bad, you can use Activity Monitor to delete it without having to cancel the entire application.

Check the memory usage

Macs depend on a combination of physical memory and virtual memory to get things moving. Virtual memory uses space on the Mac drive. The physical memory accesses the installed RAM chips. Physical memory is faster.

The more your Mac needs to rely on virtual memory, the slower it will work. Virtual memory also creates swapfiles that grow in size over time. (To find them, select Go> Go to Finder folder, type / var / vm, and then click Go). Swap files can help slow down a system by using disk space. It is not necessary to delete them manually. Instead

Quit applications: to make things better, quit applications that you are not currently using. Then restart your Mac Among other things, delete your swapfiles.

Check the use of memory with Activity Monitor: as before to check memory usage problems, start Activity Monitor. Look under the headings of the Real Mem and Virtual Mem columns. If an application uses a disproportionate amount of Real Mem and Virtual Mem, you can stop it by selecting it from the list and clicking Finish.

Activity Monitor now shows the system memory at the bottom.

I usually concentrate on the system memory statistics at the bottom of the activity monitor. (Click the System Memory tab to see it.) If the Page Failed and Exchange Used values ​​are high (more than 2 GB, approximate approach), and the amount of free space in the registry free approach at zero, insufficient memory is likely to contribute to your downturn.