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Top Five Ways to Turbo Boost you Mac for Free

May 10th, 2007 · 29 Comments

No matter how fast your Mac was on the day you unwrapped it and took it from its box for the first time, it’s almost certain to be running much more slowly now. If you’re like me, your reaction to the delays in opening applications, downloading email, and sometimes even just typing will range from a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders to a full-blown fit of rage, depending on your patience levels at the time.

Of course, you could spend money upgrading RAM, adding a new hard drive, or even treating yourself to a new graphics card – if you have a Power Mac or Mac Pro. You can, however, give your Mac a boost much more easily, and for free. Here we list the top five ways to turbo boost your Mac for free.

1. Free-up some space. Mac OS X’s virtual memory is a demanding beast. And to feed it, you need to keep at least 15% of your hard disk free. Do this by; emptying the Trash, in the Finder and in applications like iMovie and iPhoto; deleting unwanted applications – AppDelete is free and works a treat; removing language support files for languages you don’t need – use Delocalizer for this, it still works despite not having been updated for five years.

2. Clear your desktop and keep open windows to a minimum. Every icon on your desktop uses system memory and every open window uses processor cycles. So keep them to the minimum to optimise your Mac’s performance.

3. Log out other users. Mac OS X’s Fast User Switching feature is great but having multiple users logged in at the same time consumes system resources, so if your Mac is running slowly, make sure you’re the only user logged in.

4. Keep Spotlight in check. Spotlight periodically indexes every volume mounted on your Mac, unless you tell it not to. Indexing uses resources and can slow down your Mac. So to improve performance add volumes you don’t need indexed, such as back-up drives or scratch disks, to Spotlight’s privacy list in the Spotlight System Preferences pane.

5. Do routine maintenance. Versions of Mac OS X before 10.4 ran regular maintenance scripts in the middle of the night. So if you turn your Mac off every night, they won’t run. The solution is to run them manually. Brian Hill’s MacJanitor allows you to do this for free. There’s a new system for running maintenance scripts in Mac OS X Tiger so they don’t run in the middle of the night. However it’s buggy and so it is still worthwhile downloading and running MacJanitor.

This post has been entered in ProBlogger’s Top Five competition. Click the link and check it out.

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Tags: Mac OS X Tips

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