I have been using a Mac since 4 months and have realized that it is relatively more stable than Windows. You might argue on this but this is purely my opinion.
I am able to use 6-8 applications on Mac simultaneously without affecting much on its performance. But the story does not hold true if I go beyond 8 apps. So, I have done some Google-ing and compiled the list of best ways to speed up Mac.
15 Best Ways To Speed Up Mac
Reduce The Start Up Apps
This is one such trick which works on all the operating systems. There are number of apps and processes which get started at the startup. And if you restrict few of them, you can see a good enough improvement in its performance. All you need to do is navigate as Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and mark checks in the boxes which you believe useless.
Clean OTHER In System Preferences
In the System Preferences section, if you find any programs which you think are not used by you very often, it would be better if you would remove them. Navigate to the folder, “~/Library/PreferencePanes” and remove the apps which you do not need.
Remove The Languages Which Are Not Being Used
Mac supports number of languages. I am not aware of all the languages that Mac supports. So, if I could remove the languages which I could never speak or understand, the performance would marginally improve. Use apps like of Monolingual and get rid of unnecessary code to speed up Mac.
Fix Disk Permissions
Sometimes, improper disk permission do affect your Mac’s performance. So, you can navigate to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and choose your hard drive and then select, Verify Disk Permissions. And if required, you can fix the improper disk permissions.
Clean Up Trash
I always wonder why people keep stuff in recycle bin. I would suggest you to open your trash, restore the ones you need and clean the rest of the trash. This surely has some affect on the performance.
Update Your Mac
If you find any of the updates for the Mac OS you are using, just get it updated. Every update has number of fixes. So, this directly results to better performance. Try this if you want to speed up your Mac.
Remove Animation
You can navigate to System Preferences > Dock and uncheck the Animate opening applications to reduce some burden on the OS. But personally, I wont prefer to do it because design and graphics is something which made me buy a Mac.
Manage Dashboard
If you are not using any Widgets, then it is always recommended to disable to Widgets. You can get this feature deactivated from General Pane. Even though you use Widgets, it would be a smart move to remove the ones which are not used by you.
Control The Fan
Heating up of Mac is like one the most common problem faced by each Mac user. There is a free Mac app, Fan Control which lets you control the speed of your Mac’s fan. So, whenever you are doing heavy tasks, you can use this app to increase the fan speed in order to keep it cool. If used smartly, this is a great app to have to speed up Mac.
Turn Off Connectivity Options
It is recommended to turn off the features like Universal Access, Bluetooth, Speech Recognition, and Internet Sharing. These features consume a lot of memory. So, it would have a direct impact if you turn off these features when not in use.
Keep Your Hard Drive Clean
Keeping your hard drive clean has a positive affect on your Mac’s performance because Mac uses free hard drive space as virtual memory. This is the reason that your Mac goes sluggish if your hard drive is full of data.
Use Optimizing Apps
There are Mac apps like OnyX, Cocktail, and TinkerTool which offers you with so many options to speed up your Mac. The best thing about such apps is that you get to do complicated tweaks using its graphical interface.
Clean Cache
Cleaning Cache always helps to speed up the machine regardless the OS you are working on. But the thing is, how would you clean Cache on Mac. Then here is some help. Launch the terminal on Mac, login as Root and fire the below command:
atsutil databases -remove
Defragment Your Drive
Now this is quite a debatable topic if you need to defrag your drive on Mac. But one thing is true that it wont do bad if you defrag it, it would only do good if it does anything. You can use apps like iDefrag to defragment your hard drive.
Do Not Cluster Your Desktop
I have seen number of Macs which have cluttered desktops. And trust me, such Macs do perform bad in terms of speed and response. Keep it clean and make is faster.
In addition to these, there are many more ways which would speed up Mac. Please comment and share your experience. Let us know if you are aware of such tips to improve your Mac performance.