A clean desktop, apps that launch almost instantly, a roomy drive for your files. Sure, that brand spanking new Mac laptop feels and performs great, but just wait a couple of months.
Without a little tender love and care, your Mac can start to feel slow and rusty. Although, it doesn’t have to. Here are three things I just did to make my 1.5-year-old MacBook Air run like new.
1. Clean out the junk
My biggest problem was that I had under 6GB left on my MacBook Air’s 128GB solid state drive, and Apple’s own storage usage tool unhelpfully reported that over 50GB was being taken up by “Other.”
Disk Inventory X tells you what is taking up space on a Mac hard drive. Derlien
A free app called Disk Inventory X was a godsend. After doing a short scan of your drive, it will identify what is taking up the most space. Along with a really cool visual representation of your drive, you can see what specific folders, applications and other items are taking up the most space. I saved a bunch of stuff elsewhere and then deleted them from my computer’s internal drive.
But there’s a lot of junk on your system—cached files, temporary iTunes files—that you wouldn’t know to delete. That’s where Trend Micro’s Dr. Cleaner comes in. The free app scans your machine and then suggests files that are safe to be cleaned off. I wiped off an extra gigabyte in temporary iTunes files and browser and application cache files.
Trend Micro’s Dr. Clean is a free Mac clean-up tool. Trend Micro
2. Kill those unneeded programs
In the process, I deleted a handful of applications I don’t use anymore, too. But I also discovered a number of apps that launched every time I reboot my computer, slowing down the system in the background but providing no immediate value for me.
In System Preferences, I opened Users & Groups then looked at Login Items. I disabled a handful of apps—including ones from Fitbit and Canon, which weren’t appearing in my dock—from launching at startup.
3. Update your operating system
Those constant Mac OS update popups are annoying, but stop dismissing them and just hit update. It may seem obvious but Apple is constantly improving performance, even small updates like the recent OS X 10.10.3 has small performance and stability tweaks. You can check to see if you have an update in the App Store.
More importantly, Apple is promising big performance gains this fall with the free OS X El Capitan update. Your old Mac should benefit from app opening and switching that’s twice its current speed. With speeds like that, who needs a new Mac? (But I really want that new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display.)
Without a little tender love and care, your Mac can start to feel slow and rusty. Although, it doesn’t have to. Here are three things I just did to make my 1.5-year-old MacBook Air run like new.
1. Clean out the junk
My biggest problem was that I had under 6GB left on my MacBook Air’s 128GB solid state drive, and Apple’s own storage usage tool unhelpfully reported that over 50GB was being taken up by “Other.”
Disk Inventory X tells you what is taking up space on a Mac hard drive. Derlien
A free app called Disk Inventory X was a godsend. After doing a short scan of your drive, it will identify what is taking up the most space. Along with a really cool visual representation of your drive, you can see what specific folders, applications and other items are taking up the most space. I saved a bunch of stuff elsewhere and then deleted them from my computer’s internal drive.
But there’s a lot of junk on your system—cached files, temporary iTunes files—that you wouldn’t know to delete. That’s where Trend Micro’s Dr. Cleaner comes in. The free app scans your machine and then suggests files that are safe to be cleaned off. I wiped off an extra gigabyte in temporary iTunes files and browser and application cache files.
Trend Micro’s Dr. Clean is a free Mac clean-up tool. Trend Micro
2. Kill those unneeded programs
In the process, I deleted a handful of applications I don’t use anymore, too. But I also discovered a number of apps that launched every time I reboot my computer, slowing down the system in the background but providing no immediate value for me.
In System Preferences, I opened Users & Groups then looked at Login Items. I disabled a handful of apps—including ones from Fitbit and Canon, which weren’t appearing in my dock—from launching at startup.
3. Update your operating system
Those constant Mac OS update popups are annoying, but stop dismissing them and just hit update. It may seem obvious but Apple is constantly improving performance, even small updates like the recent OS X 10.10.3 has small performance and stability tweaks. You can check to see if you have an update in the App Store.
More importantly, Apple is promising big performance gains this fall with the free OS X El Capitan update. Your old Mac should benefit from app opening and switching that’s twice its current speed. With speeds like that, who needs a new Mac? (But I really want that new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display.)
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