Several times a week, I have people coming to me and complaining that their computer is slow and if there is something I can do to “clean it up.” The first thing that I usually ask is how their computer is slow. Is it slow at startup? When streaming videos on the internet? Opening files? Trying to edit your family vacation scrapbook? Are you getting the spinning beach ball a lot or is the machine just freezing up?
Slowness can be caused by a variety of reasons such as inadequate RAM, software corruption, and failing hardware like a hard drive or logic board. On a Mac there is not a lot to “clean up” that will help computing speeds by any significant amount. Unlike the old days of the PC, we do not need to defrag the hard drive to help compile most used data, and the Mac is still quite resistant to the trojans and viruses that can bog down the Windows platform.
For the average user, slowness can be measured in the time it takes from the moment the user depresses the power button to the moment that they can log onto the internet to check their email or stalk their friends on Facebook. Fortunately, there are a few things that we can do to help cut down computer load time at startup.
When your computer starts up, it has a series of tasks that it has to do. The speed at which it does these tasks is completely reliant on the computer hardware and therefore we do not have control of these functions as a user. However, from the minute that the machine logs the user into the operating system the user can start to influence the rest of the startup process.
One of the easiest ways to speed up load time is to eliminate the number of items that are saved on the desktop. The desktop is different from other folders in that anything that is stored on the desktop must be rendered and displayed. One of the first things the computer tries to after it logs onto a user account is render these icon. The more things that are saved to the desktop, the longer your computer is going to take to load. This is especially true if you save things like images to your desktop which have to generate a preview of the file.
Disabling startup items is another easy way to help cut down on load time. Do we really need Skype, Spotify, Dropbox, iChat, Google Drive, uTorrent, antivirus, and printer software for that old clunker that has been out of ink since last fall trying to open every time we turn on the computer? Most people will freely admit that they do not need nor want these items to auto open at startup but they have no clue how to disable them. So here it is — a quick crash course on how to disable Login Items.
The first thing you need to do is open System Preferences. You can get to System Preferences by clicking on the apple icon in the upper left corner of the menu or by clicking the icon the looks like a gear which most likely lives on your dock.
Next, you’re going to go to Users & Groups which can be found under the System heading in System Preferences. Select your user account from the left hand column and then click on the Login Items tab at the top of the page. Here you should see a list of all of the items that are set to automatically open when you start your computer. To disable a startup item, simply highlight the item and click the (-) button.
Hopefully, these tips will help you to shave valuable seconds of startup time so you can get back to wasting countless hours browsing the web.