Your Mac is Slowing Down?

I found a very useful article on how to improve the performance of your mac. If someone is interested, here's the link:Your Mac is slowing down? Here’s what you need to do…

If you have any other tips on how to improve the speed of a mac, please consider sharing them

TechMaster said:

I found a very useful article on how to improve the performance of your mac. If someone is interested, here's the link:Your Mac is slowing down? Here’s what you need to do…

If you have any other tips on how to improve the speed of a mac, please consider sharing them

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Thanks for posting that. The first tip is a rather excellent one that I rarely see mentioned, and I haven't thought about it much but will try to keep in mind for the future now that you mention it. A lot of people have a tendency to store everything on their desktop, but that habit is very very bad for system performance. It's a really bad habit coming from Windows, where desktops are frequently littered with shortcuts. The more that gets on there, the worse things get. We've seen people have their systems rendered unusable by accidentally copying/moving hundreds of files (photos for example) to their desktop.

Huh. Is it the number of icons on the desktop (i.e. a folder full of 1700 photos would = 1 item) or the total number of items in the desktop hard drive path? (i.e. a folder full of 1700 photos would = 1700 items)

The latter. The reason this happens is because the Desktop (unlike any other folder) is constantly being refreshed. So the more items on it, the harder the processor has to work to constantly refresh/re-index the contents.

I didn't read the article (since I've been preaching the "clean your dang desktop!" mantra for years now), but here's my other simple tips to keep your Mac humming along for years on end.

1. Keep a lot of free space on the hard drive available at all times. "A lot" is a phrase everyone has a different interpretation of, but I say a dead minimum of 12-20GB (depending on the amount of RAM you have, virtual RAM space in reserve has to at least triple your actual RAM), and a lot more would be a lot better. Mac OS X just needs a LOT of "elbow room" to do it's thing, particularly if you're working with media apps.

Basically, if you have less than 10% of your drive available, it's time to either do some spring cleaning, move the media files to their own drive or think about getting a bigger HD. You're not asking for trouble yet, but you will be if you let that drive get much below 10% free space.

2. DO REGULAR BACKUPS. This should actually be point #1 but I'm lazy.

3. Every so often (not all the time, just periodically) run a quality utility tool like OnyX (**NOT** MacCleanse!!) on your system.

4. (Optional) This last one is just my personal practice, I backup to both a Time Machine drive AND I use a clone program (SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner) to make a bootable clone on a different drive. Copies or really irreplaceable stuff also gets periodically backed up off-site (for most people, there's not really much stuff that is genuinely irreplaceable other than photos or financial/legal records).

5. Because I have a bootable clone on hand, about once a year I like to do a "nuke and pave" on my boot drive, by which I mean I start up from my freshly-made clone drive and ERASE (zero out) my boot drive, then restore back from the clone. Macs don't generally need "defragging" or "optimizing" but once a year seems to me to be a good idea to me. Makes a minor difference in speed but noticeable -- at least for a while.

lifeisabeach said:

A lot of people have a tendency to store everything on their desktop, but that habit is very very bad for system performance. It's a really bad habit coming from Windows, where desktops are frequently littered with shortcuts. The more that gets on there, the worse things get. We've seen people have their systems rendered unusable by accidentally copying/moving hundreds of files (photos for example) to their desktop.

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I'm with you all the way, LIAB. My friend Pete the illustrator, who lives round the corner, is a chronically untidy person who treats his desktop exactly as he treats his studio: it's permanently littered with a chaotic mass of files and folders - and then he wonders why his machine stutters and crawls...

Just one query, though: did you mean to use the word "shortcuts" there? I'm just wondering, because I've always understood that there's a crucial difference between keeping actual files on your desktop - baaaad voodoo - and having (a reasonable number of) shortcuts/aliases there, as these use up very little in the way of memory or processor resources. Am I mistaken here?

espi said:

Just one query, though: did you mean to use the word "shortcuts" there? I'm just wondering, because I've always understood that there's a crucial difference between keeping actual files on your desktop - baaaad voodoo - and having (a reasonable number of) shortcuts/aliases there, as these use up very little in the way of memory or processor resources. Am I mistaken here?

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Nope. I meant shortcuts. They are files too, albeit small ones. The size of the file is irrelevant. Just to cite what chas said:

The reason this happens is because the Desktop (unlike any other folder) is constantly being refreshed. So the more items on it, the harder the processor has to work to constantly refresh/re-index the contents.

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The system has to refresh the graphics for each and every one of those icons constantly. A desktop full of just shortcuts is probably a negligible impact on modern systems to be honest, unless there are literally hundreds on there, in which case how would one find anything? The same goes for desktop wallpaper actually… having one is a drag on the system, though again a negligible one on most anything these days. It's hard to exactly quantify these things. You could always try an experiment with his system. Find a good benchmarking tool and run it now, then move everything off the desktop and re-run it to see if anything changes.

lifeisabeach said:

You could always try an experiment with his system. Find a good benchmarking tool and run it now, then move everything off the desktop and re-run it to see if anything changes.

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Oh, I've given up hope with him. I've lost count of the number of times I've gone round there, cleared his desktop, unclogged his OS and given him the stern lecture - only to find, a month later, that it's back to its usual midden. It's just who he is. Lovely chap, don't get me wrong, but hopelessly disorganised. He's made his digital bed: he can lie in it.