6 Quick Steps to Speed Up Your Mac

If your Mac is taking a long time to boot, there are a few quick steps you can take to speed up your Mac. First, make sure that no unnecessary applications are running in the background. Unneeded applications can take a lot of system resources, and this will negatively impact your performance. You can easily remove these programs by going to the System Preferences and clicking on the Login Items tab. If you see any programs that you do not use regularly, click the minus (-) icon to get rid of them.

Second, look in the Activity Monitor and see which processes are taking up most of your CPU. In most cases, the most resource-intensive apps are listed at the top of the CPU tab. Try to close these apps if possible to free up memory. Increasing the RAM on your Mac is a great way to boost its performance and make it faster.

Third, you should force-quit apps that are running in the background. These apps will show up in your dock with little dots next to them. You can also quit them using the keyboard shortcut Command + Q. Additionally, you should shut down heavy applications when you aren’t using them. For example, you should shut down Steam, which by default runs in the background and drains your system resources. You can also force-quit any app that’s causing a performance slowdown by clicking on its icon.

Clearing out the cache on your Mac is another quick way to boost its performance. Macs create caches of files in order to make loading content faster. However, these files can be huge – up to 20GB in some cases. Luckily, you can safely delete these files from your Library folder in Finder. You may notice that your Mac is a little slower after clearing out your caches, but this will improve as it rebuilds caches again.

Another quick way to boost your Mac’s performance is to clear the desktop. Too many icons on your desktop will slow down your Mac. When you have a large number of icons on your desktop, your Mac will treat each icon as a separate window and this will take up valuable RAM. You can use the desktop Stacks feature to arrange desktop items and delete those that aren’t needed.

Disabling startup applications will also improve your Mac’s performance. Many applications are launched at startup every time you log in. Disabling these applications will free up your computer’s RAM and prevent unnecessary applications from starting. Furthermore, you can use a utility in the Finder to sort applications by the date they were last opened.

To reset your Mac’s SMC and PRAM, first make sure that your Mac is powered off. Hold the power button for about 5 seconds and then plug it back in. After the battery is removed, the SMC will be reset and your Mac will perform much faster.