- In this video, we're going to show you
how to speed up your Mac,
debunk some misconceptions about what makes Mac slow,
and help you avoid some massive mistakes
that a lot of Mac users make.
First thing to ask yourself,
is it a slow internet connection or a slow Mac?
If you think it's just your internet connection,
we have timestamps in the description.
Skip ahead to that section of the video.
But if your entire Mac is slow, the first thing to do
is check for those bad third-party cleaner apps.
- They're kind of ironically the worst offenders
when it comes to slowing down your Mac.
To check to see if you have one installed.
I mean, you may remember doing it,
but you can always go to Finder,
on the lower left hand corner of the screen,
a little smiley face guy,
and then tap on Applications on the left,
and then just take a look through here
to see if you have any cleaner apps.
And later on, we're also gonna show you
another way to find out if something like this
is running through Activity Monitor.
It can be trickier than you might think
to uninstall these apps.
I'll show you how to find the best way.
If you just go to Safari,
the lower left hand corner of the screen, I'll click on that
and then I'll hold Command and hit the T key
to open a new tab.
And MacKeeper, I'm gonna pick on them today.
Just search Google for how to uninstall MacKeeper,
and you will find a bunch of results.
This is the official guide.
MacKeeper, in my opinion, has gotten better
over the of years, but it's still unnecessary.
It would be nice if you could just drag applications
from the Applications folder into the trash can,
empty the trash and be done.
But not with these apps.
Fortunately, in order to avoid getting in too much trouble,
they do have guides about how to do it.
But for instance, on this one,
you have to manually go to all these different folders
and delete a bunch of files.
So it's really just not the best process.
- Yes. Avoid them in the first place.
Next check Activity Monitor.
See if there's anything that's using a ton of your CPU.
- Hold Command, hit the Space bar to open Spotlight search.
Type in act.
Activity Monitor is the first suggestion.
Tap the Return key to open it up.
And this is Activity Monitor.
- First, you wanna make sure
that you're viewing all processes.
- [David] Click the View menu in the upper left hand corner
of the screen and make sure that All Processes
is checked here.
Then close the View menu and tap on the % CPU.
And you might have to tap it twice
if it was already selected to get the descending view.
And then you'll see a list of what's running on your Mac
in descending order.
Most of these things are totally fine.
In my case, I don't see anything here that is concerning
because I really am vigilant
about keeping the crap off my Mac.
- If you see something that's up to 90, 95, 99%,
that is what is slowing down your Mac.
It's using all of your CPU.
And it's also not uncommon.
You know, you open Activity Monitor for the first time
and Activity Monitor is that top process.
That's just cause the app is opening up
and it's starting up and that's normal.
- That's totally normal.
- But if you see something, you know, 90% or more,
that's the problem.
Another very common reason why Macs gets slow
is 'cause they just run out of storage space.
- Yes. The rule of thumb here,
very important, make sure that you have twice
as much hard drive storage space, SSD storage space
on your Mac as you do RAM.
So RAM times two, that's how much you want free
so that the virtual memory, the swap space,
has enough space to work within the drive.
How do we check?
I'll click the Apple menu
in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
- Click about this Mac. - Click about this Mac.
- [David] You can see how much RAM your Mac has
next to Memory, 32 gigabytes.
- Right, so we wanna have at least 64 gigabytes
of hard drive storage available.
Tap Storage here in the middle.
I have 1.04 terabyte, or a thousand gigabytes available.
It's more than 64.
I'm in good shape.
- Next we're gonna check for a macOS update.
Always a good idea to keep your Mac running
the most recent version of macOS.
Keep it running smoothly.
- Yeah, in fact, your computer might get faster
with a more recent version of macOS.
A lot of times that's what happens with Macs.
Pretty good.
- Yep, so click on that Overview tab in the window.
- Okay. Overview. - Then click Software Update.
- All right, click on Software Update.
An update is available for your Mac.
I just need to restart.
But since I don't wanna wait 45 minutes,
let's keep going with the video.
- If an update is available for you,
just click Download and Install.
Next, let's talk about apps.
Apps, you know, can really slow down your Mac.
First thing to see, are there too many apps open at once?
- Right, if you're coming from a PC,
you can hit the little X or however you do it nowadays
and close the window and the whole program closes.
Not necessarily so on a Mac.
How do we know what apps are open on the Mac?
- We got those little dots below the app icons in the Dock.
- Right, I'm just gonna close
this software update, system preferences real quick.
So if I just zoom in down here,
you can see these little gray dots
at the bottom of the screen, under Photoshop, under Firefox.
If I come over here, we've got one under Slack.
- You got a lot of stuff open.
- Yeah, all these programs at the bottom
with a dot underneath are open right now.
That's a lot to be running in the background
and you might not realize it,
especially if you came from a PC.
So to quit a program is different on a Mac
than to close the window.
And the reason they do it that way
is because to reopen a window is much faster
if the program is open,
then opening the whole program from scratch.
To close programs that are open on your Mac,
two finger click,
or if you have a mouse, Control + click
on any of these icons with the dot underneath,
you'll see Quit, choose Quit.
- You can those dots are disappearing
now that we've closed these apps.
- Indeed.
And then when you go back in and open it for the first time,
for instance, Firefox, we'll take a look at that.
It will reopen it's default view.
So it's not as if it's a bad idea.
- We also have a lot of app icons in the Menu bar
at the top of the screen that we need to be aware of.
- Earlier in the video, we talked about CPU usage
and a CPU can be a bottleneck,
but another thing that can be a bottleneck is the RAM.
And your computer only has so much memory,
I guess Mac calls it memory,
available to run different applications.
By closing these apps at the bottom of the screen,
we took a lot of load off of the memory of your Mac.
But it doesn't mean that all the programs
that can be closed will be closed.
In the upper right hand corner of the screen,
all these icons in the mini bar are also running.
So some of them are Mac icons
like, Time Machine, can't really turn that off,
or the battery.
But then over here on the left side,
for instance, Dropbox.
Cloud services, especially cloud storage services
like Dropbox or Google Drive
can be especially memory intensive.
I'll click on Dropbox at the top of the screen here
and then tap the settings gear.
And I could just choose to quit it, which would close it.
But I would encourage you in each case to open preferences
and look for something like this checkbox.
Start Dropbox on system startup.
I'm gonna uncheck that box
which is gonna prevent the same problem from happening
next time I reboot my computer.
I'll close this window.
You'll notice that it's still up here at the top
so I am gonna click on it.
Then click the setting gear, then click Quit.
Next one over, Google Drive.
I like Google Drive though,
I'm gonna lead get there, 'cause I know what it is.
If you don't know what it is, close it.
- Well, a lot of people aren't gonna know some of the things
that are our next tip.
Login items.
These are things that boot up when you login.
- Indeed, I'm going to get there by using Spotlight.
It's a teachable moment.
So Command + Space to open Spotlight.
SY, got Caps Lock on.
Hit Return.
There you go.
- Next, click Users & Groups.
- Users & Groups.
The little user.
- Yeah, and you already selected on the current user.
That's where you want to be.
- That's me.
- So next to the Password tab there,
there's the Login Items tab, click on that.
- Boom.
- These items will open automatically when you login.
- Yes, look through this list.
If you don't want one of these things to open
and run in the background, slow down your Mac.
So for me, Skype for Business, Nope.
Click on it, hit that minus button.
You'll see that a lot of these
have this Hide check box.
This is for your convenience.
So you're not seeing the windows
of these sort of applications that are just utilities.
Doesn't mean they're not run.
Android File Transfer Agent, don't need that.
- Yeah, I recently updated my Mac,
went through this list on my computer, I had like 15.
And a lot of them were also duplicated,
which can't be good.
- You went through and removed them.
This is a good video for us to do too, you know.
- If you're enjoying this video so far,
consider joining this channel.
- [David] This is not an easy video to make.
If you wanna help support our channel and our mental health,
please consider joining this channel.
It's a great way to support us and win stuff.
Giveaways. - Get your name on the screen.
Like you're seeing all these names right now.
- These wonderful people.
- Click that join button down below.
But don't go anywhere.
We have many more tips including closing tabs
when you've got so many open.
- Right, and it's a good habit to get into
whenever you're quitting an application,
use Command + Q to actually quit the whole thing.
That way the little dot will disappear at the bottom.
And the whole program will actually close,
not just the window.
So you mentioned tabs? - Tabs.
Let's go to Safari.
- Now. I never have a problem with tabs.
Oh, wait.
- My general rule of thumb is when I can't see the names
of the websites I'm on anymore, I've got too many tabs open.
- Yeah, what do I have open?
I don't know. I don't even wanna count them.
- Lots of tabs. - What do I do?
- Having this many tabs open is bad
because each tab that's open
is like it's own little program using your memory.
- Right. We're gonna open Activity Monitor again.
Command + Space for Spotlight, act Return.
You know how to get there.
I sorted by process name this time
because I wanna have them in alphabetical order.
And on my Mac, you will see each one of these
is using a little bit of CPU.
Every single one of these websites right now.
Let's open in it's end of the tab.
Little bit of CPU, little bit of memory.
Actually, a lot of bit of memory.
It's like having 30 programs open.
- Yeah, you know, you don't need that many tabs open.
To close the tab on your Mac,
you can do Command + W to close that individual tab.
- All right, Command + W.
- If you wanna close all of your tabs at the same time,
right click or two finger click on one tab.
And you have the option to close all tabs.
- Close Tab, Close Other Tabs,
Close tabs to the Right.
Close other tabs. Boom.
- There you go. One tab left.
Like updating your Mac,
it's also a good idea to update the apps on your Mac.
Let's go to the App Store. - I will.
First, I'm gonna quit Safari and not just close the window
with Command + Q,
and I'm gonna quit Activity Monitor with Command + Q.
You can't quit Finder by the way.
Tap the Apple menu in the upper left hand corner
of the screen then tap App Store.
- You've got that Updates option, click on that.
Any available app updates you have will appear here.
Your apps were updated recently.
- Yeah, I have it on auto update.
- Ever since macOS Sierra,
the Mac has run maintenance tasks on its own
to keep things running smoothly.
However, it needs some RAM and it needs battery life
to actually run those maintenance tests,
rather than just shutting down your Mac entirely.
It's a good idea to put it into sleep mode, plug it in,
make sure it's charging.
- That's right. All right.
So I'll just tap the Apple menu
in the upper left hand corner of the screen.
Tap Sleep.
- There you go.
It's also though a good idea to shut down your Mac,
maybe once a week just to give it a nice fresh start.
- Right, so sleep mode doesn't actually kill everything
you saw in Activity Monitor and start it all from scratch.
It's still there.
It just sort of goes into a hibernation mode
but shutting it down does.
So then it has to reload everything from scratch
which obviously takes a little bit longer,
but also can fix problems like this.
A couple more side notes.
The first time you open the Photos app, or the Mail app,
or after you add a new account to the Mail app,
a database has to get built for all of those emails
so that your Mac can access them quickly the next time.
Same with Spotlight.
For instance, when you turn on
or update your software on the Mac,
Spotlight reindexes it.
So that's another reason.
Those are the background processes we're talking about.
But for instance, with the Mail app,
if you quit it, it won't keep indexing.
So just let that Mail app go,
walk away for a half hour.
Come back. All your email will be there.
Indexed, zippy.
Same thing with the Photos app.
Databases are involved.
- Now let's talk about what to do
if it's your internet connection, that's slow.
We said that at the beginning, let's get to it.
The first thing, turn Wi-Fi off and back on.
- Let me quit the App Store, Command + Q.
Wi-Fi, look for the baseball-diamond-looking thing
in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
If you don't see it, check Control Center on a newer Mac
by clicking on that.
But most people will see this.
You may see turn Wi-Fi off.
I just have a switch so I'll toggle it off
and I'll toggle it back on.
- If you're really concerned about your Wi-Fi speeds,
try running a speed test
- Right, so this can fix, by toggling it on and off,
we're talking about the connection
between your computer and the router.
A speed test will also test the connection
between the router, the modem,
and your internet service provider.
There can be problems there
where you're not getting the speeds that you should.
My parents actually just had that problem.
So you could just Google speed test.
I'm just gonna tap Run Speed Test.
Search for speed test in Google.
- While that's going click that Subscribe button
below this video.
Help this video reach more people with slow Macs.
- My internet connection is 400 megabits down,
20 megabits up.
But you'll see that I only have 204 megabits download
on my Mac.
That is normal.
Unless you have an ethernet connection
directly to your Wi-Fi router,
it's not gonna be typically as fast as it can go
because Wi-Fi is just not as fast as wired connections.
This is not a problem.
- It'll even say your Internet connection is very fast.
And it says very slow or slow or awful.
I don't know what the verbiage is for...
. It's probably not horrible.
Also just try moving closer to your Wi-Fi router.
Could be a Wi-Fi router problem.
If you move closer and it gets faster, it's not your Mac.
- Yeah, you should also try for getting the Wi-Fi network
and setting it up again.
When your Mac connects to a Wi-Fi network
for the first time, it saves information
on how to connect to that Wi-Fi network.
So something has changed,
then you might need to set it up like new.
- How do we do it?
- Well, let's click on that Wi-Fi icon, top of the menu.
Click on Network Preferences.
- Okay.
- Click on Advanced.
- Okay, I'll go to the bottom and click Advanced.
- Then select your Wi-Fi network that you want to forget it
and then click the minus button.
- Pro tip here.
If you don't see your Wi-Fi network at the top,
there's no need to go through this whole list
and like hunt and peck for it.
Just tap anywhere in here
and type in the first few letters like Meow, I'm Meowi.
First few letters of it, it'll go right to it.
Then you can tap that minus button.
Then you'll just have to reconnect.
Click on the Wi-Fi icon again in the upper right hand corner
of the screen and just reselect your Wi-Fi network.
You will have to reenter the password.
- Could also be a router issue.
Try unplugging your router and plugging it back in.
There's also that reset button on the back of your router
if things are really bad.
- That's for routers though.
If other devices are fast near the router
and the Mac is so slow, it's probably a Mac problem.
It's unlikely.
Could be a router problem - Could be.
That's what to do when your Mac is slow.
Hopefully, these tips sped it up for you.
If they did, give this video thumbs up
and join this channel.
- Yeah, joining this channel is a great way to support us
and our mission to help you and everyone else
with a slow Mac to have a faster Mac.
And really, is there a better cause than that?
- I don't know, but you can find out
by clicking that Join button down below.
Thanks for watching. - Thanks.