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Thursday, June 21, 2012

How to speed up old Mac | Speed up my old Mac OSX running slow

How can I speed up my Slow old Mac ? Some tips to boost old Mac performance without much expenses. The Mac users who have bought their machines 5 or 6 years ago, find the sluggish behaviour their Mac and likely lusting over impressive fast performance of newer models and their specifications. A new Mac could be a solution but, not the only one to resolve the issue.

How to make slow old Mac fast ?
A few hardware upgrades could be considered to boost Mac performance. So, first we to identify the upgrades for your machine which may count replacing hard drives, adding RAM or even new optical drives, such as DVD and Blue-Ray.
The user may also consider swapping the processor (not suggested for home users but for professionals).

How RAM helps to speed up Mac system ?
During any process, the RAM assigns more data to the chips without relying on hard drive. It helps to enhance the rate of data accessibility and thus makes quicker switching between applications, avoiding the spinning beach ball.
Before purchasing a new RAM its important to ensure compatibility like type of RAM, number of slots etc. Please don't follow the idea that bigger is better with every model, especially in case of older machines.

Role of Hard drive in speeding up your Mac
Its important to note that Mac OS uses free space on drive as virtual memory. So, the more of it is available, the more it can be used. Its suggested to keep at least a quarter of drive size free for this purpose. But, its not easy to maintain with small drives in older Mac's plus ever-growing media libraries.
In order to create free space in your machine, options include purchasing an external hard drive but the task is little technical.
Another way goes for using cleanup software to release some space erasing unnecessary data from drive. Stellar Speed Up Mac is one such application which tool to gain free space on hard drive.

Limit the number of login items
In accounts section, clicking the Login Items tab lists all the software that launch when your Mac boots up. These applications do nothing except eating away your precious RAM? Stop them if you don't need them.

Clear out your apps
Its a well tried and tested method for sprucing up your system. This method shows you an instant difference in performance before and after deleting unwanted apps from your machine.
This can be done automatically with the application mentioned above with simple drag and drop option and plain user friendly environment.

Keep your old Mac applications up to date
Its all in favour of old Mac users that Apple still releases updates for software in their machine – even for PowerPC machines – using which can boost your Mac. The same is true fot drivers for printers, scanners and other software. Please ensure that they're all up to date to keep.

For more tips visit: http://www.stellarspeedupmac.com/

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Apple says No need to defrag Mac| Mac reduces fragmentation

Why there is no option in Apple disk utility to defrag Mac drive. Why there is no need to defragment Mac disk ? The only answer to this question is – Mac OS is smart to minimize the chances of fragmentation.

How does Mac OS handle fragmentation ?
The Mac OS X later than 10.2 have some built-in safeguards to prevent fragmentation of files. Lets see the techniques behind it.
  • The HFS+ file system of Mac doesn't allocate the recently freed space to save a file. Instead, it tries to allocate the larger free space first. It reduces the chances of fragmenting the files to make them fit in available space.
  • OS X gathers small files and rewrites them into new location on same drive with larger free space. It helps to defrgament all the files in the group.
  • Hot file adaptive clustering in Mac OS X is another technique to reduce fragmentation. Here the frequently-accessed files (read only) are moved to a special zone so as to make their access faster.
  • Delay in allocating memory to file. The OS X allocates memory in bunches. This reduces chances of saving fragments of a file in separate locations.
These safeguards reduce the level of fragmentation upto very significant extent and that is the reason Apple disk utility doesn't need to offer an extra option to defrag Mac drive. As we know that every technology has some limitations, so is the case with Mac also. 

If the size of Mac files exceeds 20 MB , then the OS can take care about fragmentation of that file. In those situations, one needs to defrag the files via some third party tools like Stellar drive defrag.

Also, when the size of free space get lesser than 10% of total size of drive, the OS X can't defrag the files automatically. So, one must keep adequate free space on drive by removing useless applications, unnecessary language files, unwanted universal binaries etc..

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

How to fix Mac running out of space- Declutter Mac drive

How to remove clutters from my Mac ? How to declutter Mac completely? Is my Mac running out of space? Why should I remove clutters from Mac Lion to regain speed ?

Some very obvious questions being asked by Mac users facing the dialogue box popping “your startup disk is full”. This confirms that your Mac is running out of space and its the time to declutter your Mac drive.

When a user buys a new machine he takes it granted that the drive is never going to full. But, with the passage of time he keeps storing everything irrespective of significance of the items. This leads to accumulation of useless items (clutters) in drive. The list includes duplicate items, useless language files , cache files, universal binaries etc..

Causes of cluttering Mac drive ?
Before discussing the solution its intelligent to give a thought to the cause of the problem. Try to remember those applications which you installed to use them only once. They used few Gigabytes which are still in use but unnecessarily.

Secondly, some files which are downloaded via browser or have been received as email attachments consume space. These things get accumulated on your drive either knowingly or unknowingly and consume gigabytes of precious drive space.

It is important to note here that the personal photos or videos that we create with our cameras or camcorders, eat too much free space in drive. Technically speaking , every 10-MP (megapixel) photo consumes about 4MB in JPEG format. An average video (HDV) of one hour consumes about 13GB of data. How about keeping the final video only.

So, its obvious that even the largest hard drive can get full with such practices. Please note that the OS needs at least 10% of free space on drive to keep the files in contiguous order (a process known as defragmentation) and make process uninterrupted. The lack of space may cause the files fragmented and leads to delay in file accessing and ultimately a slow Mac.

As many of our readers know that SSDs solid state drives are much advanced than HDD with fewer chances of fragmentation of files. But, SSDs are costly than HDDs.

 

Gain free space in drive – Declutter your Mac drive

Now is the time to remove useless data from Mac machine and gain some free space. You are required to identify those files which are to be deleted. Its very time taking and close to impossible to delete all such files from your drive manually. So, its recommended to use a cleanup tool to remove clutters from your Mac. The tools like Stellar Speed Up Mac , are capable enough to remove useless data.

This cleanup tool lists all such files and applications which can just be selected and deleted permanently from your Mac drive.
Click here to know more about Tips to clean Mac drive