Have you ever felt like your Mac was trudging along so slowly you were practically time traveling in reverse?
Yeah, you may be thinking “I should’ve put this on my Christmas list!
I guess it’s time to pony up the bills for a new one?”
But wait! Before you rush to the Apple store, here are some simple tips you can try to speed up a sluggish Mac computer.
This is DIY in 5!
Hey everyone! Welcome to DIY in 5. My name is Trisha Hershberger and today, we’ll be discussing
some simple tips and tricks you can use to breathe some new life, and more importantly, speed,
back in to that Mac.
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click that thumbs up and more importantly subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss out on any future tech tips.
One of the simplest things you can do to speed up a sluggish iMac or MacBook is to restart it every now and then.
Ok, don’t come after me. I’m well aware that turning something off and on again is the most annoying piece of tech advice out there
but it’s good for all of us, myself included to have a reminder sometimes.
A restart will give your Mac’s RAM a fresh start and gets rid of any forgotten,
unnecessary programs running in the background.
Next, hunt down any resource hungry programs and apps that you aren’t using, and close them!
Head into Applications, Utilities then open Activity Monitor to see what’s currently running
and how much of your system power is being used by each app, broken down by CPU, Memory, Energy, Disk and Network.
Navigate to the menu bar, and choose View, then select Windowed Processes.
From here you can go back to the main activity monitor window and quit any unused, frozen or runaway apps.
After looking into Activity Monitor, you may be curious as to how or why
so many programs were actively running in the first place and to this I say, let’s clean up Start Up.
Go to System Preferences, Users & Groups, then select the Login Items tab.
This will show you which apps and programs are set to launch when you power on your iMac or MacBook.
Simply select any programs you don’t want to launch during start-up and click on the
minus sign at the bottom of the list to delete.
Perhaps iCloud syncing is the cause of your slowed down woes?
When using iCloud, try to avoid storing large files and documents onto your desktop for storage,
unless they are files you use often. This includes photos.
Speaking of storing large files, when your Mac is running low on storage space,
you may see a substantial dip in speed so let’s take care of that too.
Open Finder and access your Downloads folder.
It’s often overlooked and might hold a bunch of stuff you’ve forgotten about.
Feel free to go through photos, videos and music files as well.
In the list view you can sort by file size to see the largest files at the top.
Backup what you want to keep to an external hard drive and delete the rest.
Then finally, empty the trash.
Deleted files will still take up space on your hard drive if you forget that step.
Speaking of storage, another way to get a quick speed boost on any computer is to
swap out a traditional hard drive for an SSD.
An SSD upgrade will give you significantly faster speeds when it comes to boot up, loading programs,
saving files, transferring files and more.
Not only are SSDs significantly faster than HDDs, but they are also more reliable and energy efficient,
prolonging battery life as well.
The Kingston website has a useful tool
allowing you to input your system information and it will show you compatible memory and storage upgrade options.
We’ll link that in the description in case you’re interested.
And here’s a table showing all the Macs that can have their internal storage upgraded since they use internal SATA drives.
Sometimes the cause of a super slow Mac can be simple. It could be graphics related,
screen saver, fancy animations or otherwise.
Removing a screensaver or changing an animated background can be speed saving solutions.
Another thing to consider is systemwide updates.
Whether it’s the OS or individual apps you are updating, a lot of times
these updates include performance improvements as well as feature updates, so update on all fronts.
So far I’ve mentioned a lot of maintenance tasks to help speed up a sluggish Mac,
but if there’s actually something wrong with the device that’s slowing you down, you should definitely check out Disk Utility.
Disk Utility has a First Aid feature that can check and repair certain disk problems
and let you know if your disk is on its last legs.
And finally, when it seems all other hope is lost, you can try to reset your entire Mac and do a clean reinstallation of the operating system.
Be sure to backup first and leave yourself plenty of time and if you need help to go through this,
we’ve got a previous DIY in 5 episode to walk you through it.
Hopefully one of the steps in this video helped save you from having to purchase a brand new Mac device,
and if not, congrats on your brand new shiny machine I guess?
I love a new PC as much as anyone, but I also love DIY fixing my own gadgets
to get as much use out of them as possible.
Take care everyone and I’ll see you next time with more DIY in 5!