How can I speed up my Mac?

Make sure you have a backup of all your data before you perform any maintenance.

How much free space is left on your hard drive?

FMCook wrote:

How can I speed up my Mac? It is running slow, slow, slow.

Have a look here...

macworld.com/mac-troubleshooting-what-to-do-when-your -computer-is-too-slow.

Basically... Make sure you have enough Free Hard Drive space for your Mac to Perform as expected...

Rule of thumb is about 15 to 20 GB

This is what Apple has to say.

http://support.apple.com/kb/PH10798

More Info Here...

Thomas A Reed > http://www.thesafemac.com/mpg/

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4331

Pete

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.

There are a few other possible causes of generalized slow performance that you can rule out easily.

• Reset the System Management Controller.
• If you have many image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons, move them to another folder.
• If applicable, uncheck all boxes in the iCloud preference pane.
• Disconnect all non-essential wired peripherals and remove aftermarket expansion cards, if any.
• Check your keychains in Keychain Access for excessively duplicated items.
• Boot into Recovery mode, launch Disk Utility, and run Repair Disk.

Otherwise, take the steps below when you notice the problem.

Step 1

Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the icon grid.

Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.

Select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.

Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.

Select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?

Next, select the Disk Activity tab. Post the approximate values shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec (not Reads in and Writes out.)

Step 2

If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.

Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.

When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.

Purge your program memory. This will speed things up, especially if you have any runaway memory hogs. Purging seems to also help with CPU usage, but I can't explain why exactly. Maybe because all of the memory leaks are also eating up CPU power?

Open Terminal (spotlight search is easy way to get there), let the terminal load for a second, type "purge" and hit enter. The computer will seem to slow drastically for about 5 seconds or so, then all returns to normal.

This dumps all the stored memory that is not being used by programs. Sometimes there are memory "leaks" even after you quit a program. Purge the system and free up all that space. You'll be surprised how much faster things will run.