Necessary Steps to Speed Up my Slow Mac

Mac Machines, like other computers, also go slow with the passage of time. There are some technical solutions to this issue. A Mac user should know the reason behind this before he attempts technical steps to get rid of slow Mac. Following are some steps which can help you to gain some Mac speed:

1. At least 15% of your Mac drive space should be free

An application requires some fixed amount of free space to run. The more the number of applications running at a time the larger the space required. If there is no sufficient space for these applications, there may be some issues with Mac speed. So, try to keep enough free space in your drive so as to speed up Mac performance.

2. Keep your desktop clutter free
   Try to keep your desktop clean with fewer icons. Since finder has to draw the icons on your desktop. So, a desktop full of icons can slow the rendering process down (and hence slow down your computer). To get out of it remove the clutter from your desktop. Remove or delete those unnecessary old files and folders from your desktop or group them into a folder, helping to reduce the rendering(creating icons) workload on Finder.

3. Repair permissions using Disk Utility
   Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility > [Select main Hard drive] > Repair Disk PermissionsThe events like unintentional shutdowns, power outages, and hard drive crashes may lead to corruption of organizational directory, which can lead to slow performance or glitches. So its a good idea to run the built-in OSX utility called “Disk Utility” to repair those corrupted permissions. It’s a process that may take several hours to complete so you may want to do it over night or after you finish your work for the day.

4. Remove unnecessary Login Items.
   System Settings > Accounts > [Username] > Login Items
   There are some programs such as update managers, Google Notifications which keep running in background and consume system memory to slow down its performance. More often we do not use all those programs regularly. Removing the unused programs from the Login Items reduces the amount of time it takes your computer to start up and should help speed up your performance.

5. Remove unnecessary widgets from your Dashboard.
   Go into Dashboard > click the small “+” in the bottom left corner > click the “x” that appears in the top left corner of your currently active, unneeded widgetsThe widgets are small applications that run in the background of Dashboard. Although they are not a major consumer of memory, but still their removal can gain you some free memory if you want to gain some more Mac speed.