14 DAY TRIAL // Whether you are talking about your car, phone, dog, your favorite football player or even about trying to make the best out of your work day, speed is one of the things – if not the most important – that always come up. The same theory applies to your Mac and the way you want it to respond to your commands.
There are countless pieces of advice you can find on the Internet telling you what you can do to make sure that your Mac is as responsive as you want it to be. However, although some of those tips will show you the right path to achieve that, others have nothing to do with improving the speed of your Mac’s OS X system.
What you can do to make sure you are not doing daily maintenance work on your Mac with no effect just because someone told you that, let’s say, is to repair the disk permissions. Actually, when repairing the disk permissions, OS X will just examine files and folders on your hard drive to check if their current permissions are set the way they were supposed to be.
If the permissions are different from the expected ones, they will be changed to their correct settings. That is only one of the many suggested practices users will wrongfully perform on a daily basis when noticing that their Mac is getting a little sluggish and unresponsive.
In fact, there are ways – correct ones – to make sure that your Mac keeps staying as responsive as the day you had OS X installed. The practices you will see listed bellow will ensure your Mac always performs at 100% of its capabilities and will allow you to enjoy the OS X experience in full throttle.
Back up your data when you are not using your Mac
Getting used to backing up your data when you are away from your Mac will allow you to use it without having to wait for your apps to open or to perform the way they are supposed to. Thus, you have to make sure that you will always schedule backup sessions for when you are sure that you will not be working on your Mac.
Clear out any unused system preference panes
This is a tip that made a couple of people I know cheer up when opening the activity monitor and seeing the CPU usage dropping from 30 something percent to a mere 10 percent in an instant. Why does that happen? Because many system preference panes will run processes in the background that will automatically start once you login on your Mac.
The most important fact is that you will not be able to stop those processes from starting up using the Login Items features.
If you will decide that you no longer need one of the preference panes, you can easily uninstall it by right-clicking on it and using the contextual menu that will appear. Should you not be able to remove them this way, you can always open a Finder window and delete them from the ~ / Library / PreferencePanes folder (where ~ is your home folder).
After deleting them, you may want to reboot your Mac to make sure that the preference pane and its associated process are completely removed.
Use as little login items as possible
It is always a very good idea to keep the login item list as light as possible by removing any applications that you can open later. Why? Because having many programs starting up at login time is a sure way to run a lot of them in the background without ever needing them.
Having a light login item list will also mean that you will be able to start working on your Mac a lot faster than if you would have to wait for all startup programs to load. Go to System Preferences / Accounts / Login Items to be able to add or remove programs from your Mac’s startup list.
Make sure Spotlight is disabled for external hard drives
If you are not a big fan of searching for files on external drives, disabling the indexing for such drives in Spotlight’s options will guard you from experiencing all kinds of slow-downs when connecting them to your Mac. After all, you should be the one using the drive at its full capacity and speed and not Spotlight.
Going to System Preferences / Spotlight / Privacy and adding a mounted external drive to that list will take care of that matter. If you also hate Spotlight snooping around on your hard drive and building indexes while you are trying to do your work, you can also add your Mac’s internal drives to the list (that also means that you can say good bye to speedy searching your Mac using Spotlight’s simple interface).
Always update your system
Although this does not seem to bring any immediate advantages to your Mac experience, you should make sure that you always keep your Mac up-to-date. You should follow this advice, because many of the system and application updates Apple will seed come with a combo of bug fixes and speed increases.
I was not sure if I should add this to the list due to it being a common-sense measure each user should take, but, finding out that many users preferred to skip it because they felt it was too time-consuming and considered it annoying when asking for reboots, I decided to go for it and add it to the rundown.
Reboot your Mac from time to time
This will take care of all those applications that have memory-leak problems (some apps will eat up hundreds of MB of RAM if left running continuously for long times).
Always keep your desktop clean
This is something that will help only the users of pre-Leopard Macs because in OS X Leopard Apple changed the way dock icons are managed. Thus, if you are a Leopard user you can skip this one.
Keeping your desktop as icon-free as possible is a good way to save RAM, because of the way Apple decided to deal with desktop icons. Each of the icons on your desktop is a fully fledged window that will use your Mac’s RAM memory.
Thus, if you are the kind of person that just downloads everything on their Mac’s desktop and never cleans it up, you will notice a sensible boost in your Mac’s performance once you will move all 700 and something images and documents from your desktop to a folder of your choice.
Those are all the things you need to know if you want to keep your Mac responsive and as fast as possible. Do you know of other Mac speed-up tips not covered in this article? If the case, share your knowledge with us and the other readers in the comments.