Speed Up Mac Lion | Speed Up Mac OS X 10.7

Its almost a month passed since I upgraded to Mac OS X Lion. I noticed a surprising fall in speed of Mac Lion and resulted in slow Mac OS X Lion. Then I realized that a limited system resources are not enough to support the new features and services in Mac Lion.

The other Mac Lion users like me, who are using Mac Lion with insufficient hardware configuration might have already faced kernel panic messages and lags in Mac Lion performance while working with multiple applications. A serious applications trials and Mac tools research led me to fix some issues to speed up Mac OS X 10.7.

Its important to note that Mac Lion has inbuilt tools to take care of its health by running scripts after fixed intervals. These scripts run on daily, weekly and monthly schedules to pull off the system logs, debris, caches and other redundant items that would impinge upon system speed. Since these actions are carried out on a predefined time, it may not take place always. The system should be ON and working at the time of script execution, otherwise the garbage files will keep on accumulating.

So, its suggested to close those unwanted program cycles, unwanted browser tabs and program windows that are not in use, to speed up the Mac OS. Disable Mac OS X services or daemons which are not much useful but drains a share of resources.

Stellar Speed Up Mac is a tool to Speed up Mac Lion and prior versions of Mac OS X. Its an ultimate and easy to use application to clear cache files generated by applications, unwanted language files, browser history items and software log files.

The application is comprised of three modules.

1. SpeedUp Mac : This option is meant for removing useless data from main volume (boot volume). There are five types of files that can be dealt with .
   

a. Large files
b. Cache and temporary files
c. Language files
d. Universal binaries
e. Duplicate files

User can also change the settings of these files for size, accessing frequency , setting file filtering and languages. The user can preserve the important files by deselecting it from the list.

2. Clean My Mac: This option of Stellar speed up Mac is designed for both bootable volume and non-bootable volume as well. The files which are removed are aagn the same as mentioned above .
   
3. Uninstaller : The option is self explaining which is designed to remove unused Mac applications from your machine and help you to avail free space on Mac drive. This section deal with Applications, Widgets and plugins installed in your system.
   

Do We Need to Defrag Mac Lion Hard Drive?

Many of the computer users who have recently switched from Windows to Macintosh, are in habit to defragment their hard drive so as to ensure fast performance by their computer. But, in Mac, they often ask - I don’t see any way to defragment Mac hard drive. Do I need to be concerned about this?

Apple offers an application to work upon Mac disks called Disk Utility. If you open up Disk Utility, you’ll notice that it doesn’t include a tool for defragmenting your hard drive. The reason for this perceived oversight is that a Mac running any version of OS X later than 10.2 does not need to be defragmented. OS X has its own built-in safeguards that prevent files from becoming fragmented in the first place.

• HFS+ file system in Mac doesn't use recently freed file space on a Mac disk. Instead, it looks for larger free areas already present on the drive, thereby avoiding fragmenting files just to fit them into available space.
  
• OS X dynamically gathers groups of small files and combines them into larger areas on your disk automatically. The process of writing the files to a new larger location defragments all of the files in the group.
  
• OS X implements Hot File Adaptive Clustering, which monitors frequently-accessed files that do not get changed (read only), and then moves these often-accessed files to a special hot zone on the hard drive. In the process of moving these files, OS X defragments them, and then stores them in the area of the hard drive that has the fastest access.
  
• When you open a file, OS X checks to see if it is highly fragmented (more than 8 fragments). If it is, OS X will automatically defragment the file.
  

The result of all these safeguards is that OSX rarely, if ever, needs to have its disk space defragmented. The only real exception to this is when your hard drive has less than 10 percent free space. At that point, OS X is unable to perform its automatic defragmentation routines, and you should consider either removing files or go for some third party defragmenting tool for Mac.

Its also important to note that although the Mac OS X is too smart to handle the fragmented files but its limited to 20 MB only. If a user want to defrag a file larger than 20 MB, he must use a third party Mac application like Stellar defrag drive to defrag his Mac disk or any particular Mac file.

Clone Mac Lion before you Switch from Lion to Snow Leopard

Since the release of Mac Lion, people are searching for ways to upgrade from Mac Snow Leopard to Mac Lion. But, if we talk about universal experience, not everyone is satisfied with Mac OS X 10.7. There are many Mac users who wish to step back to Snow Leopard. Although its possible but not easy because a simple re-installation may delete all your apps and data, stored in your system. It will be easy if you have a clone of your pre-Lion drive.

1. What if you don't have a clone of pre-Lion drive?
Unfortunately, if a user has no backup of his Snow Leopard , then he has no choice. In this case one must clean wipe his disk and install Snow Leopard. Lets discuss how to save your data and get back to Snow Leopard. All you need is a Snow Leopard Install Disk.

1.Create a backup of User folders to an external drive. This is to save all your documents and other data like photos, music, etc.
2.Insert the Snow Leopard Install disc and restart your Mac. Hold down C to boot to your DVD drive.
3.Go to Utilities in the menu bar once the installer pops up and select “Disk Utility.”
4.Find the drive in the sidebar where Lion is installed, select it and navigate to the Partition tab.
5.Click on the drop down menu under Partition Layout and select “1 Partition.” Hit Apply.
6.Now navigate to the Erase tab and make sure you select “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” is selected, then hit Erase to delete all data on the drive.
7.Quit Disk Utility to get back to the Snow Leopard installer and proceed with the install.
8.Restore your User folder and documents from your Mac backup.

2. What if you have cloned your pre-Lion drive?
If you cloned your Mac before Lion installation, then you can have everything back as it was.
One of the most efficient application to clone Mac drive is Stellar Clne Drive. Its an easy to use Mac utility a Mac user. The method of cloning Mac disk with Stellar Drive Clone has already been discussed in earlier post. Assuming you’ve done that, follow the above instructions upto 6 and start the steps given below.

1.Attach the drive on wich you have stored your Snow leopard backup.
2.Go to -> System Preferences -> Startup Disk.
3.Select the external drive as the startup disk.
4.Restart and launch Stellar Drive Clone
5.Select your backup in “source” menu.
6.Select the Mac’s internal drive as the destination and hit continue.

So, the above discussion might support my point that is a user is planning to switch from Snow leopard to Mac Lion then he must preserve a valid backup of all his applications and data by cloning Mac.