As reliable as they are, Macs are not immune to slowing down. Here are some tips that will help speed up your Mac.
This first is a fix for many problems that arise in the computer business: restart your machine! It is super simple and simply powering down can cause any apps running in the background to turn off to free up your valuable and finite system resources.
The next is to monitor your system resources. Simply launch Activity Monitor from Applications > Utilities and keep an eye on your CPU usage, System Memory and Disk Activity when you notice things getting slow. It might just tell you who the culprit is.
The next is just as simple as the first: quit any apps you aren’t using. It’s like how my mom always told me to turn the lights off when I left the room. With fewer apps running your computer, there are more resources to delegate to what you are working on.
The next few solutions, unfortunately, are not free ones, but it’s the least expensive: upgrade your RAM. The prices for memory have significantly dropped for Macs in recent years, and going from a measly 2GB to 8 or 16GB (if your computer can take it) will do the trick.
The next may be two-fold: upgrade your hard drive. If you upgrade from a standard hard drive (with spinning platters) to a solid state drive, you’ll see a few speed improvements. Alternatively, if you have run out of room on your hard drive, increasing its capacity can give you machine the wiggle room it needs.
The final tip is a whopper: buy a new computer. Technology advances so quickly these days that the moment you buy a computer, something better comes along. If you are the kind of person who can afford to drop the big bucks on new tech all the time, we’re jealous! For everybody else, sticking to a 3-5 year upgrade plan seems to work.
These are just a few of many tips out there that could potentially lead to your machine running faster. I encourage everyone reading this to send me your tips on how you like to speed things up.