It’s always a sad day when you realize your older Mac isn’t quite performing how it used to. Perhaps it’s a bit sluggish to open certain applications. Perhaps the time it takes to boot seems to be getting longer and longer. And perhaps all that data you’ve accumulated over the years has almost filled up your storage space. It’s realizations like this that can sometimes push users to prematurely purchasing a more up to date model. Fortunately, there are a few ways to breathe a bit of “life” into your older machine.
First and foremost, performing backups is always recommended before making any significant changes to your machine.
If your machine has accumulated some desktop or toolbar junk seemingly inexplicably, you may have unintentionally acquired some malware. Tracing back to the genesis of this malicious software can be difficult, especially with older Macs, but luckily there’s a free application out there called Malware Bytes that does the hard work for you. Malware Bytes scans your hard drive for any traces of this malicious software and walks you through the removal process step by step. After the removal process you may notice your computer runs much more smoothly than it did before.
Having a lot of files on your desktop can be convenient, but when you boot your machine it can certainly bog down to the startup time, as your machine will have to load all of those items, one by one in order to complete the startup process. Instead of having a lot of files all neatly organized on your desktop, I recommend creating a folder called ‘Desktop’ and storing all your most frequently used or opened files there.
And speaking of storing files…
Having your files just a few clicks away is great, but keeping too many files on your hard drive is a surefire way to keep your machine sluggish. In this case, an external hard drive is your best friend. I personally keep my Photos library and iTunes library on two separate external hard drives. Granted, doing this is also a bit of a process worthy of some research before deciding to do so, but it’s definitely kept my Mid-2012 MacBook Pro trucking right along in its oncoming golden years.
Along those lines, a few times a year I’ll go delving into the contents of my hard drive and do some manual housekeeping to keep things tidy and running smoothly.