If you’ve had your Mac for a few years you may be looking longingly at the Apple website wishing you could justify the expense of buying a new one. But luckily you don’t have to fork out for a replacement computer to enjoy speed increases: in this article, we gather some simple tips to enhance the performance of your current device.
HOW TO MAKE A MAC RUN FASTER
Below we will run through the various checks you should make to find out why your Mac is running slow and speed it up, we’ll cover why you need to have around 10 percent of your Mac’s total storage free to keep it running well and how you can free up that space if need be. We’ll also look at how to find out if a particular app is gobbling up all the processing power and how to close it. And we’ll look at 1. other changes you can make to your Mac to make it run faster, including adding more RAM or, if that’s not an option, clearing your RAM to speed things up.
Before you begin, try the following to see if they speed up your Mac:
1. Restart your Mac. If you haven’t restarted it for a while your RAM/Unified Memory could be maxed out.
2. Delete unnecessary files, apps and other items that are taking up space – especially if you have less than 10 percent of your Mac’s storage free.
3. Update your software in case there is a software issue that is causing the problem.
HOW TO SPEED UP A MAC OR MACBOOK
Follow these steps to speed up your Mac and make it run faster.
1. Restart your Mac
One of the most obvious things you can do if your Mac has slowed down is restart it. However, we understand that there will be lots of reasons why you don’t want to do that. Perhaps you don’t want to stop what you are doing and wait while your Mac restarts and the app you were using is reloaded. But restarting is usually the first fix for any Mac that’s slowed right down.
In fact that is why we recommend that you do restart regularly. Few aspects of Macs cause more arguments than the one about what to do at the end of the day: shut down or sleep? It used to be recommended that a computer should be left switched on because of the wear and tear of restarting the hard drive. With the advent of SSDs this is no longer a problem. The amount of time it would take to start up a Mac also used to be prohibitive. This is no longer the case, Macs start up almost instantly. Nowadays, the main advantage of leaving a Mac ‘sleeping’ rather than switched off is that it lets you continue where you left off. The only other reason to leave the Mac running is if you run maintenance or backup scripts at night.
Shutting down your Mac has a number of advantages many of which are related to how RAM (or
