It’s spring again, and with the new season comes the age-old ritual of cleaning out things you ignored for most of the year. Far be it from me to suggest that you clean out your basement, garage, or attic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t recommend you take a closer look at the crusty corners of your Mac. Last year, Chris Breen shared valuable Tips for a tidier Mac—all of which are worth revisiting. But I also want to draw your attention to a half-dozen digital dust bunnies that you might not have considered:
Cleaning your hard drive is by far the best and easiest way to speed up your Macbook. Go through your hard drive and clean out everything that’s slowing it down. Go through your hard drive and clean out everything that’s slowing it down. The popular opinion on here is not to use anything and to stay well away from products that claim to clean or speed up your Mac. Based on reports on here, the one to avoid like the plague is MacKeeper. Before we do anything, let’s make sure your Mac is up to date. Click the Apple icon > App Store, then click the Updates tab. Install any software updates you see here, including macOS updates. Best program for cleaning up a mac keyword after analyzing the system lists the list of keywords related and the list of websites with related content, in addition you can see which keywords most interested customers on the this website.
1. Get rid of old iChat logs
Recuva program for mac. If you use iChat, you can have the program store logs of your chats. (Go to iChat -> Preferences, click on Messages, select Save Chat Transcripts To, and then choose a folder.) By default, the program saves transcripts in a folder called iChats in your Documents folder, but you can choose a different location to store these files.
With this preference set, iChat saves a log file of every chat. This is a great idea (and especially helpful at work) if you often need to refresh your memory about a conversation. But if you send images inline during chats, these files may take up a lot of space. If you look inside the iChats folder, you’ll see that the files are organized by date. While you may want to save recent chat logs, you may have months of files you can trash, saving a lot of disk space.
2. Delete application backups
Many programs offer automatic backups, and store copies of files in a selected folder, just as iChat saves chat logs. Two programs I use often—Bare Bones Software’s BBEdit and The Omni Group’s OmniFocus—do this. Some applications, such as OmniFocus, let you choose the location for the backups; others, like BBEdit, don’t. BBEdit stores its backups in a BBEdit Backups folder in my Documents folder; I have OmniFocus store its backups in my Documents folder as well.
If you use any application that saves backups, you may find that it has tucked away several gigabytes of duplicate files, depending on how the program saves them. (BBEdit saves a new backup every time you save a file.) Deleting these backup files can save space, and make searching via OS X’s Spotlight much easier.
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While you’re at it, check in youruserfolder/Music/iTunes folder; you may find a Previous Libraries folder, which includes copies of your iTunes libraries that were saved after you installed a new version.
3. Get rid of Mail downloads
When you receive attachments to e-mail messages in Apple’s Mail, the files are stored with your messages at first. But if you double-click an attachment to view it, or if you use QuickLook to glance at it, Mail stores a copy in your youruserfolder/Library/Mail Downloads folder. You may have dozens of files here occupying a huge amount of space. You can generally delete these without worry. If you still have the original messages, the attachments are part of those messages. If not, you may have already saved the attachments to your hard disk.
4. Delete log files
Your Mac stores lots of log files, most of which you never need to review. Open the Console application (in /Applications/Utilities), to see a list in the Console Messages window sidebar.
You can delete many of these files without affecting your Mac, and you can save significant space, since some of these files can be quite large. For instance, in the screenshot above, you can see a number of system.log files. https://everdesigners.weebly.com/dyslexia-apps-for-mac.html. Best free youtube mp3 converter for mac. The first one—system.log—is the current file, but the others, with the .bz2 suffix, are archived files.
Delete these files with Titanium Software’s free utility Onyx. Launch the program, click on Cleaning in the toolbar, and then click on the Logs tab. Check System Archived Logs, and then click Execute. While you’re using Onyx, check out the many other files that the program can delete to clear up space on your Mac.
5. Weed out iTunes dupes
If you’re cavalier about how you monitor your iTunes library, you may have a lot of duplicate files. iTunes has a built-in feature to help you find duplicates, to see if you copied some files twice, or if you have the same songs on original albums and others from best-of albums.
To use this feature, choose File -> Display Duplicates. This shows all tracks that share the same name and artist. If you hold down the Option key when you select the File menu, the menu item changes to Display Exact Duplicates. This sorts for duplicates where the name, artist, and album match. Check these files carefully. You may find some that you can get rid of, saving space not only on your Mac, but also on your iPad or iPhone.
Still, iTunes’ duplicate search is limited. Doug Adams’ $15 Dupin gives you much more power to weed out duplicates, sorting by a variety of different criteria. If you add lots of music to your iTunes library, Dupin is a great way to slim it down.
6. Reset Safari![]()
If you use Apple’s Safari, some of the program’s features can take up unnecessary space. For instance, the cache file is intended to make your browsing snappier, but can easily consume hundreds of megabytes. When it gets too big, it can actually slow down browsing. History files can make Spotlight searching sluggish. And Top Sites, Website preview images, and Website icons (favicons) can slow down the program as well.
Every now and then it’s a good idea to reset Safari. Choose Safari -> Reset Safari and check the options that interest you.
I don’t reset or delete everything—you can see my choices in the screenshot above. Choose what’s most important to you, and reset Safari every now and then to speed up your browsing and save disk space.
One last tip: have you looked in your Downloads (youruserfolder https://evershe992.weebly.com/blog/best-voice-effects-program-for-mac. /Downloads) folder lately? You may find plenty of unneeded copies of files there too.
Senior contributor Kirk McElhearn writes about more than just Macs on his blog Kirkville. Twitter: @mcelhearn Kirk’s latest book is Take Control of iTunes 10: The FAQ.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Read our affiliate link policy for more details.
Now playing:Watch this: Upgrade your MacBook with an SSD
The only place I like seeing a beach ball is at a beach or in a stadium during a baseball game or concert. The one place I least like to see a beach ball is on my aging MacBook Pro, where the spinning beach ball has become an altogether too familiar a sight. If your Mac has become frustratingly slow, there are a number of ways you can speed it up again.
Before you engage in any maintenance, I would urge you to take caution and back up your data. For Macs, it's easy: grab an external drive and run Time Machine. With your Mac's drive freshly backed up, you may proceed.
1. Replace your Mac hard drive with an SSD
Moving from a traditional spinning hard drive to a solid-state drive (SSD) is the single best thing you can do to improve the performance of an aging MacBook. Follow Sharon Profis's instructions on how to upgrade your MacBook Pro with an SSD. You'll be shocked at not only how easy it is to do but also at the huge impact it has on performance.
I just performed the maneuver myself, replacing my 2011-era MacBook Pro's 500GB hard drive with the 500GB Samsung 850 EVO . The Samsung SSD and a SATA-to-USB cable kit cost me just north of $200 on Amazon. And the whole procedure took less than an hour (not counting the half a day it took to clone my MacBook's hard drive to the SSD).
Really, the hardest part of the whole thing was tracking down a size 6T torx-head screwdriver for the four torx screws that help hold the hard drive in place.
2. Add more memory (RAM)
While you have your MacBook opened to replace its hard drive, take the opportunity to add more memory. Like the replacing a hard drive, adding more memory is a straightforward, simple process.
First, you need to find the right type of memory for your specific MacBook model. The brand doesn't matter much, just be sure to buy the right amount, type, and speed. Apple has a handy support page that shows the memory specifications for a variety of models, along with an illustrated guide to replacing the memory.
In my case, my early-2011 MacBook Pro has two DIMM slots, each of which is occupied by a 2GB module. Since I don't have any free slots, I will need to replace those two modules with two 4GB modules. I need DDR3 memory with a speed of 1,333MHz.
After finding the right RAM for your MacBook, follow the photos below to install the new memory.
3. Clean your Mac's hard drive
Sometimes, all your MacBook needs is a data clean-up. Over the years, you've probably cluttered your Mac with files and applications you no longer use or need.
Uninstall old Mac apps
To get started, let's look in the Applications and Downloads folders. If there are apps in there you can't remember installing, odds are you can live without them. Move them to the Trash to reclaim some hard-drive space.
There are files associated with every application you install, however, and they are left behind when you simply move an application to the Trash. Since Mac OS X doesn't have a built-in uninstaller, AppZapper can uninstall apps and the related files. It's free for the first five zaps, after which you'll need to pay $12.95.
Clean up applications you still use
Next, let's clean up the applications you are keeping. When you install an app on your Mac, the piece of software arrives as part of a package of files, including permissions that tell OS X which users can do what things with specific files. Denon dj 1800.
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Over time, these permissions can get changed, resulting in your Mac lagging, freezing or crashing. Repairing these disk permissions, in the most basic terms, amounts to reshuffling and re-dealing these permissions so that they return to their rightful place. To address this, OS X has a built-in tool called Disk Utility that does just the trick.
Read my previous post on how to repair disk permissions for a step-by-step guide.
Find out which apps are using the most resources
If your Mac acts like it needs a nap every afternoon, when you are at the height of multitasking, there is an easy way to see which of your open applications is using the most system resources. Open the Activity Monitor.
The numbers are constantly fluctuating, but they show you the amount of CPU and memory resources each app is using. After watching the Activity Monitor for a while this morning, I see that Firefox generally takes up more CPU resources and more than triple the memory resources. Perhaps it's time for me to abandon Firefox and use Chrome exclusively. Also, I found that the sluggish iTunes isn't nearly the resource hog I thought it was. My apologies, iTunes.
Delete big, unused files
Now that you've paid some attention to your applications, it's time to look at the files cluttering your drive. You can use Finder to search for huge files. To do so, open Finder and select the volume you'd like to search. Next, choose File > Find (or hit Command-F). Click on the Kind pull-down menu and select Other. When the Select a search attribute window opens, check the box for File Size, uncheck any other boxes, and click OK. Change the 'equals' pull-down menu option to 'is greater than' and then change KB to MB. Enter a minimum files file size such as, say, 100MB. You can then delete any files that show up on the list that you no longer need -- or move them to an external drive at the very least.
4. Reduce login items
If your Mac is slow to boot up, the problem may be that there are too applications to open at startup. It's likely you never set them to launch at startup -- they launch by default.
5. Keep current with OS XPrograms To Clean Mac
Apple releases new versions of OS X as free upgrades, so there is no reason not to stay current. New versions of OS X contain performance enhancements and security improvements to keep your Mac running smoothly and safely.
Check in periodically with the Updates tab of the Mac App Store for OS X updates, and don't ignore notifications of updates that are ready to install. https://evershe992.weebly.com/blog/imovie-program-download-for-mac.
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Editor's note: This story was originally published on April 27, 2015 and has since been updated to add new advice and tips for speeding up your Mac computer. Mainstage 3 for mac download.
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