Some apps are more power-hungry than others and can slow your Mac to a crawl. To see which apps are eating up your system resources, use Activity Monitor. You can open it from the Utilities folder of your Applications folder or use Spotlight to find it.
How To Speed Up Your Mac
If you recently updated your OS, you would be aware of the slowness that occurs when Spotlight is indexing. This only takes a few hours, and then your Mac will be fine. But sometimes, the indexing gets stuck, and you need to speed up a Mac. To solve this problem, you need to reindex Spotlight by going to System Settings > Siri & Spotlight and clicking Spotlight Privacy at the bottom of the window.
RAM stands for Random Access Memory, and it is a temporary memory that the CPU uses to hold important information system processes need to run. In case of high RAM usage, your Mac may slow down, so upgrading your RAM may be a great speed-up option.
If you have no memory slots or are not ready to upgrade it, you can free RAM instantly with Terminal. You can apply this trick when your system is running out of available memory. In other words, when a particular app freezes up and desperately needs some fresh memory. Follow these steps:
A great tip to help you when you wonder how to speed up your Mac is to turn off visual effects. Sure, they look pretty, but who cares if your Mac is running slowly? Turning off some of the features can greatly speed up iMac or MacBook.
If you want the most bang for your buck, cleaning your hard drive is by far the best and easiest way to speed up MacBook or iMac. Go through your hard drive and clean out everything that is slowing it down. But what is slowing down my Mac? What to look for? Caches, logs, apps, widgets, hidden trash, and large and old files.
Typically, Macs take care of themselves. Having the latest software from Apple makes speeding up your Mac simple. To check your version of the operating system, click the Apple icon in the top left corner of your screen and then About This Mac. Make sure you have the latest macOS/OS X installed (or the latest you can install since not all Macs upgrade to macOS Ventura).
If you deselect some apps in this pane, they will stop syncing with iCloud. iCloud Drive and Photos are prime suspects worth a closer look. Are there too many large documents on your Mac? If so, the iCloud will hog up resources trying to sync all that massive data.
You may be surprised that Mac may become sluggish because of malware. It is due to the fact that malicious apps consume significant resources of your system, thus slowing it down. So, one way to speed up your Mac is to check it for malware. You can do it either manually or automatically.
Manual removal includes hunting down the virus application and removing it along with all of the files it has scattered around your Mac as well as getting rid of browser extensions. In the most severe cases, you may even need to create new user accounts or delete all of the information you had on your computer. Detailed steps are outlined in this article on how to remove viruses and malware from Mac.
If you think that your Mac may need a speed-up because of a hardware issue, you may easily test it with Apple Diagnostics. It is also known as an Apple Hardware Test that helps determine which hardware components are not working properly.
Rest assured that you are not alone. All Mac owners experience this sooner or later. As the months and years go by, their best buddy that used to do everything at the speed of light begins to slow down and take ages to load.
A slow application can make your whole Mac feel slow. Regular updates often contain bug fixes and improvements for programs, and if you updated your apps a long time ago, you are probably missing new features as well.
The Dynamic Desktop feature changes your desktop picture automatically and may slow down your Mac a bit.To disable the new Dynamic Desktop, click System Settings > Wallpaper. Here, click Ventura Graphic and choose either Light (Still) or Dark (Still) from the drop-down menu.
One more tip for older Macs is to turn off some of the visual animations. Sure, they look pretty, but who cares when your system is grinding to a halt? Definitely not the person using the Mac at that moment.
Turn off windows adjustment animations - defaults write -g NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001After you enter each command, copy and paste this line into Terminal: killall Finder Dock QuickLookUIService. This will close all active windows of your apps to apply changes.
Mac creates heaps of junk files like cache and logs, and while they start small, over time, they take up gigabytes of your precious space. As a result, you do not have enough storage space for apps to function, so your Mac starts slowing down.
Preference panes are where your system widgets and macOS utilities are kept. Many third-party apps add their own widgets to your System Settings. This creates an extra load for your macOS. The most common example is Flash Player, which integrates with your macOS and, in some cases, causes software conflicts.
Nowadays, almost every app is trying to trick us into seeing their notifications. We are annoyed by pushes and news updates from websites and hardly anybody knows how to switch this madness off. What does it have to do with a slow Mac? These notifications bite away a portion of your virtual memory and slow down your browsers.
If your Mac was running slower over time, these solutions should immediately make your Mac faster. It could even feel like you bought a new Mac, without a hefty bill. Remember to run occasional system cleanups with CleanMyMac X so that your Mac remains clean and fast.
The easiest way to get rid of those behind-the-scenes processes is to click one button in Quit All, the most effortless app-quitting tool for your menu bar. We love that Quit All ensures you save all the changes in your apps and browsers before you close them.
Your hard drive may be full of old files you no longer need. Like multiple instances of Finder or Preview, a full hard drive is using up valuable resources your Mac needs. Learn more about how to clone a hard drive on a Mac.
CleanMyMac X also allows you to clear cache files quickly and easily. Essentially everything you touch within your computer leaves cache files: system, browsers, apps, user preferences, etc. Over time, the accumulation of those files slows your Mac down. They are very difficult to identify manually and delete, so using CleanMyMac here is by far the easiest choice.
For newer MacBooks, including Air and Pro, resetting the SMC and PRAM involves shutting the Mac down, then pressing Shift + Control + Option on your keyboard along with the power button for 10 seconds. Then, release all keys and press the power button to switch it on.
As you can see, there are a lot of things you can do to speed up your Mac. But what happens when you run out of space? There is only so much that can be done, even when you store files in the cloud and tidy up desktops and disk drives.
Following advice above will help you get your slow Mac to speed up again. All the apps mentioned in this article, such as iStat Menus, CleanMyMac X, Spotless, App Tamer, Mission Control Plus, Quit All, CleanShot X, and many more are available with a single subscription to Setapp. Now you can go on and make your Mac life a bit easier and a lot more productive.
Before we begin, allow me a word of caution: back up your data before diving in. For Macs, it's easy. Grab an external drive and run Time Machine. With your Mac's drive freshly backed up, you may proceed.
Sometimes, all your MacBook needs is a data cleanup. The more crowded its SSD becomes, the slower it will run. You can check out how much free space remains on your MacBook's drive by clicking the Apple logo in the top left, select About This Mac and then click the Storage tab. If you are approaching maximum capacity, click the Manage button to free up some space. Here, you'll see four recommendations for reclaiming free drive space.
The first lets you use iCloud to offload files, photos and text messages. You can move all the files stored on your desktop and Documents folder from your Mac's drive to iCloud. And you can store full-resolution photos in iCloud and keep what Apple calls "optimized" versions on your Mac that take up much less space.
If you snap lots of photos with your iPhone ($365 at Amazon), using the iCloud Photo Library is probably this single biggest space saver for your Mac. Keep in mind that you will likely run up against the free 5GB allotment on iCloud and begin to pay for space on Apple's cloud. Upgrading to 50GB will cost you $0.99 a month, and the two bigger plans offer 200GB for $2.99 a month or 2TB for $9.99 a month. It's cheaper than buying a new Mac.
Next, let's clean up the applications you are keeping. When you install an app on your Mac, the piece of software arrives as part of a package of files, including permissions that tell MacOS which users can do what things with specific files.
Over time, these permissions can get changed, resulting in your Mac lagging, freezing or crashing. Repairing these disk permissions, in the most basic terms, amounts to shuffling and re-dealing these permissions so that they return to their rightful place.
To address this, MacOS has a built-in tool called Disk Utility that lets you run First Aid on your Mac's disk. It can also repair issues with disk partitions and start-up processes. You'll need to start your Mac in recovery mode and then follow Apple Support's instructions to repair your disk using Disk Utility.
If your Mac acts like it needs a nap every afternoon, when you are at the height of multitasking, there is an easy way to see which of your open applications is using the most system resources. Open the Activity Monitor by searching for it with Spotlight (keyboard shortcut: hold down the Command button while pressing the spacebar). 2ff7e9595c
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