How to Speed up a Mac
- 1). Clean off your desktop. Keeping a lot of files on the Finder’s desktop can slow everything down from startup to how fast programs react. Keep files and folders inside the hard drive, not on the desktop. Files you need frequently can be “aliased” to the desktop using Command-L or going to the Action menu of an open window.
- 2
This screen shot from Tech Tool Pro shows the Optimization panel.
Optimized your hard drive. This also may be called defragmentation, depending on the software. Tech Tool Pro has an optimization panel, and iDefrag from Coriolis Systems is a less expensive optimizer with additional features. What optimization does is reassemble all your files—files and programs—in coherent blocks on the hard drive. As you work on your Mac, bits of files and programs get scattered around the hard drive. Mac OS X automatically defrags smaller files, but reconstituting them will make the hard drive run faster and make programs and files work better. - 3
This graphic from the Powerbook User Manual shows how easy it is to upgrade the RAM.
Add RAM. All Macs make adding or changing random-access memory chips easy for the average user. Your manual will tell you the maximum RAM for your Mac and what type to get. A later 15-inch Powerbook laptop will take 2 GB of RAM, while a new Macbook will take will take 4 GB. A new bottom-of-the-line or top-of-the-line iMac comes standard with 1 to 2 GB, but can be upgraded to 4 GB. A Mac Pro comes standard with 2 GB, but can be upgraded to 32 GB. It costs a lot more to have Apple do the upgrade for you than doing it yourself. - 4). Upgrade the hard drive. Especially in older Macs, the hard drives run fairly slowly. Older Powerbooks and desktop Macs had hard drives that ran at 4,200 rpm. The standard today is 7,200 rpm, with 15,000 rpm drives becoming more readily available. The speed of the hard drive will affect how fast the computer operates. You can change a hard drive yourself in most Mac laptops and the Mac Pro. IMacs make it very difficult to change hard drives, so it’s best to get them configured before you buy them. Older desktop models also are easy to change yourself.
- 5
Norton Utilities had a very good optimization protocol called Speed Disk.
Remember to optimize your hard drive frequently. About once a month may be necessary for some users, while others may need to do it every other month. Most optimization programs will tell you how fragmented a hard drive is and will make recommendations about when to optimize.
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