In addition to the excellent advice given, I offer the following comments regarding maintenance. There are some useful maintenance activities we can do which can be very useful. They are “maintenance” steps which are often ignored.
· It is important to occasionally restart a Mac. Ideally, once a week or more often. This does some system cleaning.
· Periodically clearing the history of your browsers can help as all the data is stored in RAM. Clearing frees up RAM for system use. Ask yourself how much history you need to keep.
· Some people seldom empty their trash. If you haven’t, then do so. Also empty your email trash.
· Some programs use a lot of RAM. (Like many Adobe apps and the Chrome browser.) When using them, close any other apps not being used.
· Doing a restart in the Safe Mode can clear a number of problems. This is done by holding down the Shift key at start up. This process can take up to ten minutes while the computer is doing its maintenance and cleans the cache. You may then restart normally.
· It is also a good idea to occasionally run the Disk Utility app. If it reports some issues, then rerun it repeatedly as needed until the final report is ok.
I hope these suggestions are helpful as well.