Even the best systems or devices don’t function as quickly or smoothly as they used to when you’ve used them for a few years. Fortunately, a few quick tweaks under the hood and the performance of your Mac can be revved up. Below are a few adjustments that can give your Mac a new lease of life.
1. Speed up startup time by managing the startup programs
A clean startup is one of the best ways to speed up your Mac. If your device launches fast, it’ll take less time to accomplish any task. No more waiting for Chrome, Safari, or Firefox to launch.
You can get so much speed by evaluating the Mac startup programs and removing the unnecessary ones. Go to System Preferences and click Users & Groups > select your username and click on Login Items. Peruse the list of items and select the apps or programs you don’t need when your Mac starts up. To remove them, click the minus button.
2. The ostentatious visual effects have got to go
macOS is a nice-looking OS, but all the flashy and flamboyant transparency and animations effects consume a lot of resources. These resources could be used for running applications that you need to finish your work. To ensure your Mac runs speedily, you can disable the extra visual effects.
Open System Preferences > head to Accessibility and click the Display tab > select the Reduce motion and Reduce transparency boxes. Now, you’ll be left with a plainer but much faster interface.
In System Preferences, you can make changes to more visual settings. For instance, click the Dock & Menu Bar screen and turn off the animation for opening apps. Next, you can uncheck the Automatically hide and show the Dock box.
3. Free the hard drive storage and make space
macOS requires a chunk of free space to run smoothly and speedily. It needs space to store information on the hard disk if it has run out of RAM and store temporary files. If space is unavailable, Mac starts to slow down.
To remedy this, open the Apple menu and click About This Mac > select the Storage tab and remove the unnecessary files taking up a lot of space.
If you wish to store your videos and photos, you can click on Store in iCloud and move those items to the cloud. Delete the local copies on your hard drive storage and free up space. By selecting Optimize under Optimize Storage, you will direct macOS to browse through the Mail folders and iTunes to delete files you don’t need. For instance, remove downloaded videos or movies that you’ve finished watching.
4. Find and remove the resource-hungry programs
Some applications and programs consume more resources than others. These programs can make your Mac sluggish and impact the system’s performance. The Activity Monitor shows all the programs and applications eating a sizable chunk of your system resources. The Activity Monitor can be accessed from the Utilities Folder, or you can find it using Spotlight.
In the Activity Monitor, you can go through five different resources, such as Disk, Memory, CPU, Network, and Energy usage. When it comes to speeding up your Mac, you need to focus on the CPU section. The section showcases how processes impact the CPU activity when running intensive applications, like games or video editors. Remove the applications that are eating away your resources and not letting other apps run properly.
5. Internet connection isn’t working on your Mac
Slow or no Internet can seriously impact your productivity. It can make your Mac run slowly. So, if you’re facing connectivity issues, hold the Option Key and click the Wi-Fi icon, then select Open Wireless Diagnostics.
Running the diagnostics is one of the simplest and effective ways to determine if your network connection has an issue. When the diagnostics have finished analyzing your Mac, it will offer recommendations to solve the problems that it has detected. It would be best to follow those prompts to resolve the issue.
If the Wireless Diagnostics doesn’t find any problem, you can try switching off and restarting your router. If that doesn’t work, talk to your Internet service provider.
Conclusion
A slow, sluggish Mac is unwanted because Mac users are spoiled to think that Macs don’t slow down. The slightest delay in launching an app or starting the computer can make Mac users want to break their computer or throw it outside the window. The tweaks mentioned above will help save your investment and solve the slowdown issues instead of getting rid of your Mac.