Five tips for cleaning and speeding up your Mac-gctid50419

[Ajamu]

Five tips for cleaning and speeding up your Mac | How To - CNET

 Boost your Mac's performance and reclaim hard-drive space with this handful of spring cleaning tips.
  by Matt Elliott    April 2, 2012 12:23 PM PDT

'"

n".self::process_list_items("'.str_replace('
', '', '

• comments

8[/url]
').'")."n[/list]"'
     
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET)

  My wife and I cleaned out our attic and basement last week, throwing  out and donating six years' worth of accumulated clutter. We celebrated  each run to the dump as we literally lightened our load. Now, our attic  isn't as overwhelming, and our basement is less creepy.

 I wanted to continue our spring cleaning momentum so I turned to my  MacBook Pro, which just surpassed its one-year anniversary. Sure, the  amount of garbage I've put on it in the past year can't match the amount  of crap I found in my attic and basement, but it is slowing down some. I  see the spinning beach ball more than I care to. If your Mac struggles to keep pace from time to time, the following are some ways you can clean and speed it up.

  Step 1: Back it up
 Before you engage in any maintenance,  it's always a good idea to back up your data. For Macs, it's easy: grab  an external drive and run Time Machine.

 Step 2: Check Login Items
 If your Mac is slow to boot up,  the problem may be it simply has too many applications to open that it  can't load the OS in a timely fashion. Many applications by default open  automatically at startup. Go to System Preferences > Users &  Groups and then click on the Login Items tab to see a list of the apps  that open when you boot your Mac. Uncheck the apps you don't need at  startup.

 
(Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

 Step 3: Identify and eradicate offending apps
 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.

 Similarly, to get a picture of what's taking up the most space on your hard drive, install the free Disk Inventory X  utility. Run it and it scans your drive for a few minutes before  spitting out a graphical representation of the applications on your hard  drive. The bigger the block, the more space it's taking up. You can't  delete any files with Disk Inventory X, but the app is a good first step  in identifying which apps are eating up the most space.

 
(Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

 Step 4: Clean up your hard drive
 The biggest chore of your  Mac housekeeping efforts is reclaiming space on your hard drive. I'm  fairly certain there are files and applications on your Mac that you no  longer need. Your Mac has a utility to root out evil, and there are a  handful of free apps that will also help you clean up your hard drive.

 First, to start cleaning your hard drive, open your Mac's built-in  Disk Utility program and click on your hard drive in the left panel.  Make sure you are viewing the First Aid tab and then click the Repair  Disk button in the lower-right corner. This will run a lengthy scan of  your desktop, making repairs as necessary.

 To clear the cache that your Mac's various applications and processes  have stashed on your hard drive, install the free utility, Onyx.  It's a fairly extensive program, much of which I will not cover here.  For our spring cleaning purposes, I will direct you to the Cleaning tab  at the top of the app. Here, you can check off items across six  categories, clicking Execute to delete the cache of the checked items,  freeing up hard-drive space.

 
 (Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

 It's never a bad idea to take a gander at your Applications folder on  occasion. The same goes for your Downloads folder. 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. Mac OS  X lacks anything resembling an uninstaller, but AppZapper  is one such app. With it, you can uninstall apps and the related files.  AppZapper is free for the first five zaps, after which you'll need to  pay $12.95.

 
(Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

 My two biggest offenders in terms of taking up hard-drive space are  iTunes and iPhoto, which does not come as a surprise. Every year or so, I  move a year (or two) of photos to an external drive (while also backing  up my iPhoto library to another drive via Time Machine) to reclaim some  of my hard-drive capacity. I also delete the occasional album from  iTunes or move it to an external drive if I haven't listened to it for a  while. (I gave "Chinese Democracy" a listen and then immediately  removed it from my hard drive; I wanted to reclaim the space, and I  wanted to pretend that album never happened.)

 Admittedly, keeping your iPhoto and iTunes libraries in order is a  Sisyphean task. There are two tasks you can perform, however, which can  help. The first, is emptying the trash in iPhoto. The app has its own  trash, so all of those photos you have deleted remain on your hard drive  until you empty the trash in iPhoto itself. Right-click on the trash  can in the left panel in iPhoto to remove deleted photos from your hard  drive. And in iTunes, you may have accumulated a few duplicate tracks  over the years. Hold down the Option key and select File > Display  Exact Duplicates to view a list of duplicate songs. Be careful, some  duplicates may actually be a live version of a song or from a different  album. Choose File > Display All to view your entire library again.

 Apple ships each Mac with a variety of language files, which take up  space. Unless you are a polyglot, you'll never use these files. Or miss  them when they're gone. Install Monolingual,  a free utility that removes unneeded languages. Just click the  languages you want to remove and click the Remove button. The scan takes  longer than you'd expect; it ran for 20-30 minutes on my machine, but  ended up saving me 2.4GB of space.

 
(Credit: Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET)

 Step 5: Add RAM
 Perhaps the cheapest way to boost your  Mac's performance is to add more memory. The sealed, brushed aluminum  enclosure of the MacBook Pro doesn't exactly invite you inside, but it's  not that difficult an endeavor.

 For starters, do not buy memory from Apple. It charges $400 for 8GB  of memory, and you can find that online for less than $50. The brand  doesn't matter; everyone has his or her favorite. Just make sure you are  buying 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, I know my early 2011 MacBook Pro has two DIMM slots, each  of which is occupied by a 2MB 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 Pro, you will need to  power it off and remove the 10 small screws on its bottom panel. Be sure  you note the position of the screws when you remove them; some are  short and some are longer. Since I need to replace the existing memory  instead of simply adding a new module to an open memory slot, I had to  push outward on the two levers holding the sides of the memory module to  release it before gently sliding it out. Repeat for the second module.  Install your new memory by lining up the bottom notch of each module  with the memory slot and push it in until it clicks. Once your new  memory is installed, screw the bottom panel back into place.