Regardless, whether you are just starting out with Macs or you are already an experienced user, there comes a point in time when you wish you could squeeze an extra bit of performance from your Mac. Buckle up and let’s get to optimizing.
How to Clean Up Your Mac So It Runs Faster
Before diving into cleaning, there is one thing you should understand — cleaning your Mac won’t magically boost its power (especially if it’s new). What it will do is help channel performance towards the task you need, rather than wasting it on, for example, going over broken caches, keeping up with unneeded processes, etc.
Close Apps Instead of Minimizing Them
It kind of goes without saying, you should take up a habit of actually quitting applications after you are done using them instead of simply minimizing and therefore letting them use up extra RAM. OS X needs a lot of RAM, so the more you can free up — the better.
Prevent Applications from Starting Automatically
This goes hand in hand with the previous tip. Many apps upon installation default to launching at startup. For you to make Mac OS X faster at boot up, open System Preferences>Users & Groups>Login Items. Add or Remove the apps to your liking to make sure only the once you intend to use launch at Mac startup.
Clear Cache Files Regularly
You have to understand, having cache on your Mac is not a bad thing by any means, on the contrary, caches are what helps macOS do things faster. Nonetheless, occasional cache clearing is important due to the fact, that over time excessive cache files tend to accumulate, and, as a result, take space on your drive. In addition, cache can get corrupted and have an opposite effect of slowing down your system.
Browsers and music/video streaming applications tend to pile up biggest caches. Depending on the browser you are using, the option to clear cache will be located differently. Here is how you clear cache in Safari. First, go to Preferences>Advanced and enable Develop Menu. Then, head over to Develop from Menu bar and choose Empty Caches.
If this sounds like too much work, download MacFly Pro and perform a System cleanup. MacFly Pro will automatically scan and detect system and user caches that need clearing.
Always Have Free Storage on Startup Disk
Free storage is essential for macOS to provide surefire performance. Depending on the capacity of your drive, you may need to maintain free anywhere between 10% to 20% of total disk space. There are multiple ways to make more room on your startup disk. By far the quickest way to maintain maximum space is through the use of third-party utility apps. MacFly Pro, which you have already installed in the previous step, is a great fit for the task. It allows you to conveniently uninstall applications, clear leftover files, remove duplicates, etc.
How to Keep Mac Clean and Fast
Performing a full-scale cleaning once in a few years of time is one thing, but actually keeping your Mac clean on the daily is a whole different topic. Clean up needs to be run every few weeks or months, depending on how you use your computer. Indeed, by doing so you will hardly notice any changes, let alone how that makes your Mac faster. However, that’s exactly the point. It’s not about “how do I make my Mac blazing fast”, but rather what can you do to prevent it from slowing down.
This won’t come as a surprise, but in order to maintain your Mac clean, you will have to perform all the above-mentioned steps on regular basis. Alternatively, you can let MacFly Pro get on it. MacFly Pro features Smart Assistant that does the scanning for you. Notice, that it is not intrusive and won’t remove junk on its own, but rather provide you with suggestions.
Upgrade to Significantly Improve Performance
Clearly, there is nothing eye-opening about this statement — upgrading hardware improves performance. However, depending on the Apple computer that you own, upgrade does not necessarily mean buying a brand new Mac.
If you are using an older Mac computer that came with a hard drive, the cheapest and most impactful upgrade you can make is getting an SSD. Solid State Drives offer significantly faster read and write speeds which will result in faster loading and boot up times.
Another upgrade that won’t break the bank would be RAM. Based on your demands, 8GBs to 16GBs of RAM is the sweet spot for comfortable use. Please note, before you cash out for more RAM, consider your CPU. An underpowered processor will prevent the system from getting the most out of the upgrade.
Like most tech, you need to take good care of your Mac computer to keep it performing at the level. It’s best done with the help of third-party tools. Upgrading your hardware doesn’t need to be expensive to improve the speed of you Mac and make it last for a few more years.