We all love our Macs and with a little care and attention, they’ll last for many years. The question is, how is this accomplished? There are various things you can do and there are powerful suites of automated tools to do what you need to do in a few clicks.
Here, we’ll give you an overview of how to optimize and clean up your Mac, MacBook, and iMac.
Why is my Mac Slowing Down?
Macs from time to time collect digital clutter and when this happens websites loading times increase, the Mac becomes less responsive generally, and what was once a beautiful computing experience causes the odd expletive to creep out in frustration!
To clean and optimize your Mac, the following processes will soon bring joy back to your computing life.
Clean the Desktop
Every time you store files on your desktop your Mac slows down a little. One or two makes no difference but 25 does. Finder sees every desktop stored file as a window and tries to open it. And this is when the problems begin.
Yes, it is convenient to store files on the desktop so you can find them, but if you want a fast Mac, store them somewhere else.
Free up Hard Drive Space
Your Mac is a magnet for collecting digital junk. You may not realize it but every time you visit a website, switch it on, use an app, little bits of data are collected and stored. Over time this eats into hard drive space. According to tests, a nearly full hard drive performs 175% slower than the same model Mack with a new hard drive.
Finding the files is the tricky part and as such, you may want to try out free tools or take more steps to clean your drives of digital clutter.
Control What Starts and What Logs in
Another aspect that slows down your Mac are apps that launch or start automatically. Many you don’t need and it is good practice to switch these off. If left switched on they sit in the background unused yet using system resources.
To switch them off:
- Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups
- Click on your username
- Click Login Items
- Select all the apps you don’t need. You should click the ‘-‘ button to remove them.
And you’re done!
Disk Permissions
Disk permissions prevent apps from meddling with your system so they are great things. Sadly, they can break and this impairs your Mac’s performance. The quick and easy fix is to use a third-party app dedicated to repairing broken disk permissions.
If you want to do it right now, open the Terminal window and type:
sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages –verify –standard-pkgs /
Your Mac will check permission validity on your disk permission. If it comes across something it doesn’t like, it will state “permissions differ.”
If this happens type:
sudo /usr/libexec/repair_packages –repair –standard-pkgs — volume /
This will fix the permission.
As you can see a suite of Mac maintenance tools is a sound investment for a beautiful machine.
