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Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Uninstall Mac apps from Mac | How to trash applications from Mac


To remove Mac apps from Mountain Lion or Mac OS X Lion, the best tool I always suggest to my users is Stellar Speed Up Mac.  Although it can be done, without spending anything. The task of trashing an application can be done just dragging the application to trash. The problem with this attempt is there remain leftovers, which gradually keep accumulating to consume too much of space in your drive.

So, it is recommended to have an alternate solution to the issue. You can opt for an App cleaner and the perfect name is Stellar Speed Up Mac. Here is a video showing how to use this app for uninstalling Mac App in OS X.



Monday, July 22, 2013

How to Clean Mac Machine That Is Running Like a Snail

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.  

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Tune Up Your Mac's Performance in Easy Steps

Mac has millions of system processes executing concurrently, when it is running. These system processes, during their execution, generate several temporary files to store their intermediate results. However, these files are not deleted automatically even after completion of the process, and keep eating up system's resources (i.e. RAM and Processor). As a result, Mac becomes slow like a snail and you face performance issues with Mac.

Well, it is obvious for Mac to slow down after exercising for long, since its major resources (RAM and Processor) always stay busy in repeated execution of temporary files. These temporary files self-allocate Processor to process their execution repetitively. Besides the temporary files, several internal factors also affect Mac's performance. For example, overfilled hard drive, slew of installed applications, obsolete hardware configuration, and fragmentation. To speed up Mac and keep up its performance level, you must take care of these factors in following ways:
  • Remove all unwanted items from the Hard Drive: Hard drive stores operating system installation files along with large amount of user data, such as images, videos, songs, movies, personal and professional documents, and many more things. Go through each Mac volume and move all unused data items to any external drive. If possible, permanently delete all those items that were never used.

  • Minimize number of Installed Applications: All installed applications are stored together with operating system's files on Mac's boot volume (i.e. Macintosh HD). The size of the boot volume increases with number of installed applications, which is not good for the health of boot volume. Therefore, install only necessary applications, and remove when you are no longer going to use them. For this, go to Applications folder, look for those applications that are not in use, and uninstall them.

  • Upgrade Hardware Configuration: Mac OS X requires at least 1GB RAM to run without any interruption. However, if you play graphical game, use large-sized applications (such as Photoshop), or use both (games and apps), then you must upgrade RAM to least 2GB to speed up Mac. Besides, upgrade to latest Mac OS X version and install all necessary updates release by Apple's developers.

  • Fragmentation: Fragments are empty memory blocks in between contiguous streams of data, which are not occupied because of poor memory allocation to data segments. Because of these fragments, data becomes scattered and therefore, it takes longer time to respond when it is accessed. Since Disk Utility does not include any feature to deal with fragments, users have to use external disk defragmentation software for Mac.

  • Speedup Mac software: Get speed-up Mac software to remove all temporary files (such as system binaries, junk, cache, browser plug-ins, and cookies) in efficient way. Since these files are stored in different corners of Mac, you need to clean them up using a speed-up application.
Using a speed up application not only fastens your Mac, but frees up disk space as well.

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

What are the features in Mac OS X Mavericks that make OS X faster


Mac OS X 10.9
Is OS X 10.9 faster than the previous versions of OS X. Lets see the enhancements in Mac OS X mavericks which make it more responsive. 



  1. Compressed Memory: The feature of “Compressed Memory” helps to free up memory to OS X faster. The technology of automatic compressing helps to avail memory at runtime when it reaches maximum capacity. The OS compresses least used items in recent memory, compacts them by more than 50 percent and allows the Mac to handle more data with more efficiency.



  2. Timer Coalescing: It trims the task of system maintenance and background processes while the Mac is running on battery power. The new OS technology follows the attempt of low-level operations. The method of creating small periods of inactive moments is adopted through which the CPU enters a state of low-power to reduce CPU activity and thus to reduce energy consumption and increased battery life. 


  3. App Nap: When we work on multiple apps simultaneously, the “App Nap” comes into play to reduce power consumption. The technology puts unused apps into a low-power state that slow them down and helps conserve valuable battery life. However, whenever the user starts an unused app, it quickly shifts back to full speed. App Nap does the same trick with Safari tabs, meaning that only the visible tab runs at full speed. Apple claims that App Nap can reduce CPU energy by up to 23 percent. 
     
  4. Extra fast: With the new OS, you are going to notice nothing but a faster and more responsive Mac which doesn't waste time continually moving data between memory and storage because now it can create free space in memory by instant compressing and decompressing. So, it can do more in less time especially when you’re running many applications at once.



The above tests were conducted on machines configuring

  • 1.8GHz Intel Core i5-based
  • 13-inch MacBook Air
  • 4GB of RAM
  • OS X v10.9 (Mavericks) and OS X v10.8.4
  • 256GB of Memory

Monday, May 27, 2013

Speed up Mac OS X 10.9 | Clean up Mac OS 10.9 drive


Would I have to search for solution for slow Mac OS X 10.9 . How to fix slow Mac running OS X 10.9. As per the resources, the new version of OS X is going to release in few weeks. It is important to note that OS X Mountain Lion came with app-based features from iOS but in OS X 10.9, the additions from iOS will focus more on system fundamentals. 


Usually, we upgrade the OS X without arranging the necessary basic requirements for it. This could slow down your Mac and can ruin your Mac experience. Here we are discussing tips which can help you to fix issue of slow Mac OS X 10.9 in coming future.


Deleting unnecessary files saved on the hard drive not only speeds up the Mac machine, but even frees up the disk space. A hard drive storing less amount of data performs considerably well as compared to the one, which is about to get full. Today, computer’s hard drives offer large data storage capacity (i.e. 500GBs and more) allowing the users to store large amount of data on a single device. However, users are not aware of the gradual decrease in performance of the hard drives due to massive amount of data. Therefore, to improve Mac’s performance, it is recommended not to store the unnecessary files on the hard drive.


Well, the recommendation does not imply to delete Mac files or the data currently not in use, but move them to any external USB hard drive. There are several effective ways to get rid of the unnecessary files saved on the Mac machine. Moreover, a few easy to perform ones are discussed below: 

Clean up Mac volumes


Go through all Mac volumes scanning each file and folder manually to prepare a separate note with the names of the files currently being used, frequently used, rarely used, and finally those which are not used but are stored. Keep only those files that are currently being used and frequently used; thereby moving all rarely-used files to any external data storage device. On the other hand, you can delete the files that are not used.

Delete Auto-downloaded Mail Attachments


You send and receive emails with attachments (such as images) that remain in emails as well as automatically downloaded at youruserfolder/Library/Mail Downloads whenever you open any attachment by double-clicking it. Go to the default download location and delete all such attachments to free up the disk space, and even to speed up the email. 

Delete Temporary Files


Operating system performs different calculations, processing, and displays the result. All such events are stored in binary format in the intermediate files. These temporary files are of no use after completing the process. In addition, browser cookies, junk, corrupt, and system binaries are the files that should be removed from the hard drive periodically. 

Remove Duplicate Files


When you download any attachment from the email or anything from the Internet, it goes to a default download location. Moreover, many a times, you specify desktop as the destination to save the file. All such downloads are duplicated if you copy and paste (instead of moving) them to a location where all other similar files are saved.

You can find all duplicate files on your hard drive in Finder’s result. Moreover, you can download smart finder tools from the Internet for better result.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

Best Mac Cleaner to Clean and Speed Up Macbook

How to clean up my Mac drive ? Does it help to improve my Mac speed.
These are some of the questions I am answering in this post. The very first answer to these questions, you will get are – go for hardware upgrades.

Now, How what to upgrade in Mac...
  1. Buy a new SSD. SSD are better than HDD for greater speed.
  2. Increase RAM. First check if your machine has the adequate amount of RAM, as per the OS requirements and type of applications you run.
But, these are not the only solution to fix slow Macbook. The better and cheaper way to speed up a slow running Mac is to optimize it. Older Macs, especially laptops, came with low capacity hard drives which are not enough to serve big iTunes or iPhoto libraries and thus the machine slows down. Such an issue can be fixed by upgrading hard drive.

I strongly recommend to use the best Mac cleaning software for speeding up Macbook.

The best Mac cleaner I have ever used is from Stellar. The application can be targetted either on complete drive or at a specific volume of Mac drive. It deletes following types of files from your drive:

  1. Cache files
  2. Log files
  3. System Junks
  4. Trashes and leftovers
  5. Manage extensions
  6. Universal binaries
  7. Language files
  8. Large files
  9. Duplicate files

Some other mannual fixes, one can try are:

  1. Repairing disk permissions
  2. Clear out log in items , unwanted applications, unused system preferences
  3. Clear desktop and desktop icons
  4. Empty trash
  5. Turn off Universal Access
  6. Turn off Bluetooth
  7. Turn off Speech Recognition
  8. Turn of f sharing option on net
Keep visiting for more tips to speed up Macbook......

Mac Defragmentation Tips



What does it mean to defrag your Mac drive?

It doesn't matter on which operating system you are working either Windows, linux or Mac , with the passage of time fragmentation occurs. The reason is when you work with your system, you create and delete thousands of files in it , empty space will be created and files gets scattered over hard drive . This state of Mac drive is called 'Fragmented Mac hard drive' and as a result of this, your Mac OS X will take extra time to open any file and launch applications, because pieces of files are fragmented around your hard drive.

and to overcome this problem you need to defrag your Mac.

What is defragmentation?

It is the process of organizing fragmented data into contiguous memory location to enhance Mac performance. Mac OS X has its own way to handle fragmented data, it has the ability to minimize the chances of fragmentation up to 20 MB file size. Defragmenting Mac will leave the computer's free space in one big chunk. This will allow new files to be saved in contiguous memory location, thereby reducing the need for future defragmentation.

How to defragment hard drive?

In Windows:-
Click on the Start button - > Programs - > Accessories - > System Tools. In System Tools, you'll find Disk Defragmenter. In this program, you can select the hard drive that you want to defrag. If you want to defrag multiple drive then you can select all. Click to analyze button, it will tell you either your drive needs to be defragmented or not. You will see lots of colored bars scattered all over the graph usually means you need to defrag.

In Mac:-
As we know Apple does not provide any inbuilt tool for defragmentation to Mac users. So, if you want to defrag your Mac, you need third party tool like iDefrag, Stellar Drive Defrag.
iDefrag is very famous tool but, you have to pay more bucks to purchase it while Stellar Drive Defrag is new but, you can get it only at $39.

iDefrag- It is the product of coriolis-systems and it helps to defrag your Mac. It can defragment individual files in your Mac volume and it helps to improve your Mac performance. iDefrag monitors your drive temperature, and it will take steps to protect the drive if it starts to overheat.

Full Defrag - It combines the Metadata and Optimize algorithms defragmentation.
Full support of Mac OS X 10.8 - It is compatible with the latest versions of Mac OS X.
Works with Time Machine – It works with Time Machine back-up volumes.
Support for case-sensitive HFS+
Supports the Hot Zone – It is a smart about the files you use the most time. It moves them to an area on the disk called the Hot Zone, for improved access times.

Stellar Drive Defrag- This utility helps you to defrag all fragmented data in your Mac disk. It defrags all heavy fragmented files and optimize free spaces. When you will start scanning your Mac disk by using this tool, it will keep together all fragments of related files that can theoretically result in increased performance. There are many functions inside this tool like full defrag, quick defrag, metadata defrag etc.

If you have too much data in your drive then defrgmentation can take little longer so, it is suggested to defrag drive when you are free. With the help of this defrag tool you can easily see the fragmented file in layout view. Temperature bar is associated with this tool to show the temperature of Mac disk during defragmentation process.

Features:-
1. Defrag Mac drive effectively and safely.
2. This tool has advance algorithm to defrag Mac quickly.
3. Option to defrag a single file and metadata also.
4. After the completion of defragmentation, it sends automatic email notification (if preferred).
5. It has temperature bar to show the temperature of Mac hard drive.

System Requirements:-
Processor: Intel, PowerPC (G3 or later)
Operating System: Mac OS X Mountain Lion 10.8, OS X 10.7, OS X 10.6, OS X 10.5, OS X 10.4 and OS X 10.3.
Memory: 256 MB RAM
Hard Disk: 25 MB of free space
Defragmentation helps not only to keep scattered data in an organized manner but also boost the system performance.

So, I would like to suggest every Mac users to use Stellar Drive Defrag to keep their Mac healthy.

Mac defragmentation myths:-

Defragmentation can crash my Mac - There are many Mac users who believe that defragmentation can cause their Mac to crash or if they use defrag software for their Mac then it may lead sudden crash on their Mac drive.

Mac defragmentation is not possible – Many people think, Mac does not need any defragmentation activity because its file HFS+ has the ability to minimize the chances of fragmentation.

Defragmentation can slow down your Mac – There are many Mac users, who believes that defrag process can make their Mac slow.

Mac defragmentation facts:-

Mac needs defragmentation- Over a period of time, Mac disk stores fragmented data which causes slow Mac performance. So, Mac OS X needs to defrag Mac to improve Mac performance.

Defragmentation is an easy process- It is a very easy process and Mac users can easily perform it. However, Mac does not have any inbuilt tool for defragmentation but, with the help of third party tool, one can easily perform.

Defragmentation prevents Mac failures- If data remains in fragmented way in Mac hard drive then processor needs to put extra effort to pick them and show. In this process, temperature of Mac hard drive increases and there might be a chances of Mac hard drive failure.

Mac defrag process helps to increase Mac performance- Defragmentation process keeps all chunks of data together in Mac memory drive in sequential order and make it available for faster access by Mac OS. So, through this process Mac's performance improves.


These are the basics myths and facts about defragmentation but, it depends on us that how we take care of our Mac. For this purpose, you need regular maintenance of your Mac.