How to speed up a slow Mac

If you use a Mac system and you think that performance has gone down, you do not need to worry. You can easily speed up a slow Mac computer by following easy ways. There could be various reasons for this slowness. If you can identify why your Mac System’s performance has gone down, you can easily fix this.

Before I start, I recommend you stay away from programs that promise to “optimize” your Mac and make it faster. Most of these programs only remove temporary files and free up space, but do not actually improve the performance. A few of these start showing ads on your computer and ruin your experience.

If you still need good software, you can try CleanMyMac X. It scans every inch of your system, removes junk files, checks the health of your Mac system, and improves the performance of your Mac system.

Download CleanMyMac X

How to speed up a slow Mac

There are a few ways you can follow to speed up your Mac system.

1. Find and close resource-hungry program

Open the Activity Monitor on your Mac. This is the Task Manager of Mac systems and shows the running processes with RAM and processor usage. To launch Activity Monitor, open Spotlight search, type Activity Monitor, and press enter.

Now sort the processes by CPU usage and see the running applications. If you see any program eating most of the CPU, close the program. To force quit a process on Mac, double click on the process and then select Quit in the next dialog box. Always make sure that you are not quitting any important system process.

2. Update the MacOS

Software updates always bring better performance to fix known bugs. If you are using the older version of macOS and the update is available for your system, never hesitate to update. It is a common myth that new update makes the system heavy and slow. But updating the software of your macOS improves the performance in most cases.

3. Check your startup programs

If your Mac is slow, it may have too many startup programs. So, check the startup programs and try to remove unnecessary programs from the startup list.

For this, open the System Preferences window by clicking the Apple menu icon and then select “System Preferences.” Here, click on the “Users & groups” icon and select the current user account and then select the “Login Items”. Here see the list and uncheck any applications you don’t want to run at startup.

4. Free Up Disk Space

Freeing Up Disk Space also speeds up the system. If you have a very small amount of free disk space, you can consider removing files and increasing the free disk space. Take the backup of important files in any external storage device and connect that to the system when you need it.

5. Turn off visual effects

Animations and transparency also add a load on graphics hardware and reduce the speed of the system. If you think you do not need visual effects, you can reduce the animations to speed up your system.

To do this, open the System Preferences window. Now click on the “Accessibility” icon and check the “Reduce transparency” to reduce the transparency. You can also click the “Dock” preferences icon and select the “Scale effect”. It will minimize animation.

6. Empty the caches

Cache files are the temporary files used by different applications installed on your system. These cache files are for faster access to important data by application. For example, browsers keep a copy of the web page in the cache so next time the local cache is served to save your time. But it starts slowing your system when there are too many cache files. Over time, these cache files become too large, so instead of speeding up the browsing, it slows down the whole system.

You can use CleanMyMac X for clearing the cache. Launch the CleanMyMac, Choose System Junk, and then click on Scan. Once the scan is finished, click on Clean.

7. Delete old and large files

When your Mac runs out of storage, it also slows down the system. The more free storage, the faster the system is. So, you need to think of deleting old and large files that you no longer use.

It is also a good idea to remove those apps that you do not use. You can just drag and drop apps into the trash. Clean My Mac X also shows how much HDD space apps are taking and lets you delete apps and all associated files.

8. Reduce Desktop clutter

Each desktop icon takes space in your RAM so that when you switch to Desktop, Mac can show you what’s in there. It means the more files you have on the desktop, the more RAM it takes, and ultimately affects Mac’s speed. So, it is better to clean the desktop and arrange the data in the appropriate user folders. After you have removed files from the desktop, you will surely see an improvement in performance.

9. Reinstall macOS

If you have tried everything and you still couldn’t get the desired performance, you can think of reinstalling the operating system.

Before you follow this, take the backup of your important step. Reinstalling macOS is much simpler than reinstalling Windows. You can just boot into a special recovery mode and start the installation. Your Mac will download everything it needs from Apple to follow the reinstallation.

10. Upgrade your memory

If you have tried everything but are still not getting the performance you were expecting, you must seriously think of upgrading the system memory. More Ram means more data can be in the memory to keep the system’s performance smooth. If you think your system needs more RAM, upgrade it.

Final words

There were a few ways to speed up a slow Mac. You can try all these ways and see if any of these help you. Mac systems always perform much better than Windows systems and if it slows down, you can easily fix the problem. You will hardly go with the reinstallation of macOS or upgrade the memory. Upgrading the memory is the option only if your system is old and the memory is not enough for the latest software programs.

If you still have anything to discuss, you can comment below.