Tips for speeding up your Mac Lion | Speed Up trotting Mac

Many users who have switched from Windows PC to Mac, usually face a general maintenance issue. A specific question from one of our readers is:

“In order to clean up my PC drive, I used to format it and all the files, responsible for a slow PC, used to get deleted. It would run like it was brand new. Do I need to do the same with the my Mac? How to clean Mac drive and make it run faster.”

There are two answers for this question.
Ans1. No
Ans2. Never

                                 Mac                                                                      Windows

Mac Vs Windows

One should not throw the advice of formating Mac so casually. Although there are some Mac Lion users taking such a slash-and-burn approach. Instead, you might follow some easy tips and tricks to clean up all the dribs and drabs of cruft that slow down a Mac. In Windows the task can be done via a built-in disk cleanup tool but, in Mac there is no such feature.

1. Try to keep your desktop clean.
If your desktop is full of icons, you need to trim it down and keep the necessary ones only. Clean the unnecessary icons and keep those files by placing them in folders.

2. Restart your Mac every so often.
You can check how long your Mac has been running since the last reboot through a terminal command. All you have to do is launch Terminal ( /Applications/Utilities) and enter uptime.If it’s been trotting for weeks, restart it to flush out some old junk that’s slowing it down.

3. Check and Slim down useless contents of Mac drive
If your hard drive is nearly full, your Mac will run more slowly. Trash old files which you don't need any more.

4. Restarting browser and cleaning its cache.
Browsers are prone to slow down after running for a long time. If you find that your Web surfing has been reduced to dog-paddling, just stop the browser and restart it. Clearing the browser cache can also fix the issue to a very large extent. In Safari choose Safari -> Empty Cache. In Firefox choose Firefox -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Network and click the Clear Now button.

5. Reduce the list of login items.
Applications running in background can slow down your Mac. Go to System preference -> account ->Login Items. If you don't need everything then delete the unnecessary items.

6. Quit applications.
Per the last suggestion, it’s very easy to run multiple applications on your Mac. But perhaps there are more running than you need. Look in the Dock. If you see scads of applications with little blue dots beneath their icons (indicating that they’re active), quit those you aren’t planning to use in the near future.

7. Buy a faster (or different) drive
An SSD is much faster than an HDD, so, its recommended to go for a new drive and possibly an SSD. The readers should be aware of a new concept of hybrid drive, which we will bring in our next post.

Certainly. We have lots of helpful tips for speeding up Mac