Slow Mac, sluggish Mac, my Mac is running slow like a snail - are some of the common complaints of Mac users. This is because with time, your quick-witted Mac is cluttered with items, and hence becomes slow and shows symptoms like rotating beach ball. These symptoms clearly indicate that your Mac needs cleaning and organization of data. Removal of unnecessary items creates free space on its hard drive and improves its performance. Follow below mentioned steps to do the same:
• Clean Up Your Desktop: Some Mac users keep their desktop very untidy. They have a cluttered desktop having so many items spread all around. This cluttered desktop slows your system largely. Therefore, it is recommended to clean it up by sending all the files to the appropriate folders and all folders to appropriate volumes.
• Remove Login Items: The slow booting of Mac is a clear indication of unnecessary startup items in the list of Login items. In order to start these applications present in the list of Login items, your Mac is unable to load the Operating System on time, and hence increases startup time. To check the list of startup or login items, go to ‘System Preferences >> User & Groups’, and then click on ‘Login’ items tab to find out the list of applications that open when you boot your machine. From this list, uncheck all the applications that you do not want at startup.
• Uninstall All Unnecessary Applications: According to your requirement, you install various applications on your Mac. However, you do not use all these installed applications regularly. Therefore, after cleaning up your desktop and improving the startup speed of your Mac, it is time to go to the ‘Applications’ folder and find out which applications are useless. Select these applications and drag them to trash to remove them.
• Empty the Trash: Now, as you have sent all unused applications to the trash, it is time to clean the trash as well. The trash contains all unused files and folders. Therefore, it is the time to clean up the entire trash folder. Empty the trash and reclaim more free space on the hard drive of your machine.
• Archive Old Files after Compacting: Some files in your machine are those that you do not use frequently; however, they are of utmost importance and you cannot afford their deletion. For those old and important files, it is recommended to compress them. Compressing reduces their size to great extent, and hence frees the extra space on the hard drive. Moreover, after compressing these files, you can transfer them to an external hard drive or to a CD.
• Delete All Large and Unused Files: While compressing and archiving old files, you may find that some of the files are completely unused as well as they are so large in size that they are eating up too much space on your hard drive. Deleting such unused large files is another efficient way to earn free space on your Mac, clean it up, and hence improve its performance.
• Remove System Logs and Temporary Files Regularly: One of the reasons of slow performance of your Mac is presence of system logs and temporary files. It is suggested to clean up these logs and temporary files on regular basis. This will free a lot of space on your computer’s hard drive and improve its performance.
• Maintain a Clean Cache: Generally, most of the performance issues of Web browsers can be rectified by keeping their cache clean. Therefore, to rectify this problem, it is suggested to clean your Web browser’s cache on regular basis. Doing the same improves the speed of your Web browser.
• Close All Unused Dashboard Widgets: The widgets on your dashboard do not use any CPU resource until the dashboard is open. However, when dashboard is active, they use both virtual and real memory. However, many of these dashboard widgets are unused or used very rarely despite the fact that they consume various CPU resources all the time until dashboard is active. Therefore, to reclaim the CPU resources used by these unused widgets, it is recommended to close them. You can close a widget by opening the dashboard >> pressing and holding the ‘Option’ key, moving the pointer of your mouse over a widget that you want to close. The button for closing the selected widget is present on the upper left corner of it. Click on this button to close the widget. Repeat these steps to close all the widgets that you want to close.
• Clean Out the Mail Downloads Folder: Most of us get attachments via emails. These attachments can be image files, Word files, PDFs, ebooks, or anything else. Generally, these downloaded email items go to the ‘Mail Downloads’ folder of your Mac. This Mail Downloads folder is of very large size as it carries all your downloaded items until you have not transferred them to some other location. Get into that folder, remove all the unused email downloads, and store all the required files to the permanent location on your machine.
Despite performing these manual deletion methods and other efficient ways to optimize the performance of your Mac, it is seen that Mac machines do not get back there original performance. Moreover, removal of all unused applications by sending them to trash and then cleaning the trash as well does not clean your machine to great extent. This is because leftovers of the deleted applications remain there. The manual cleanup is not only time consuming, but a tedious task as well.
To overcome such issues, it is recommended to use a professional clean my Mac tool. Reliable cleaning utility for Mac cleans your machine completely without leaving any leftovers of an application. Moreover, you can schedule the cleanup task as well and avoid the problem of performing the cleaning of your machine on regular basis.
