Speed up your Mac

• Article 71 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2009

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | All 5 Pages

The good news is that memory is very, very cheap at the moment and it’s very easy to add to your Mac, providing you follow the instructions and aren’t too nervous about opening hatches on your Mac. Depending on the model of your Mac, 2GB chips can cost as list as £20 including VAT and they’re worth every penny.

Memory isn’t the only issue, however. If you have many programs running at the same time and they either require many calculations to be done or frequently access files on your hard drive, you’ll find your Mac slowing down. Running fewer programs will help, as will reducing the number of plug-ins used by a slow application: things like Acid Search may make Safari do cool things, but they will make it slower, too.

Many Mac programs are made of smaller programs, which may launch at start-up, not show up in the list of programs running and not quit when you quit the program. It’s therefore worth using the Activity Monitor application in your ‘Utilities’ folder to find out what ‘processes’ are running and seeing if there are any you don’t need and that may be taking up too much memory or CPU. If there are, simply select them then quit them using the ‘Quit process’ button in the toolbar. Sometimes, it’s not always obvious what a process is from its name – although usually you can guess – so be carefully about quitting processes for the sake of it.

Depending on which version of OS X you’re using, your Mac launches programs as start-up in several different ways: checking these to see what’s being launched and pruning things down can speed up start-up and ensure there are fewer processes running at any one time. First, check the Login Items of your account in the Accounts Systems Preferences pane to see if there are items you can do without it. The ‘StartupItems’ folder of the main ‘Library’ folder might also contain items installed by programs that will launch at startup. If you own Tiger or Leopard, try using Lingon (http://tuppis.com/lingon/) to see what programs might be scheduled to run at particular times or during start-up.

Speed sometimes isn’t so much to do with how quickly calculations are being performed as with responsiveness: your Mac might be doing just fine but if it feels slow to do things, you’ll end up hating it all the same. Surprisingly, a lack of responsiveness can be down to simple things like Finder special effects, or even having used the Energy Saver Systems Preferences to optimise your Mac for better power savings at the expense of performance. But there are also some tweaks that you can apply that can affect things like network speed as well. Running a program like Cocktail (http://www.maintain.se/cocktail/index.php) will allow you to optimise your network settings for maximum speed and remove things like the Finder’s “spinning rectangles” effect that only slows down to interaction.

Equally importantly, they can also perform a variety of maintenance tasks for cleaning up OS X. There are many things that your Mac would like to do to make itself run more efficiently, and of which it has set up daily, weekly and monthly schedules. Unless, you leave your Mac on overnight, every night, which is good for neither the planet nor your electricity bill, it’s unlikely that these schedules will have a chance to run on versions of OS X earlier than Leopard. However, Onyx and Cocktail can force your Mac to run those maintenance tasks, and run a few of their own, such as cleaning up the logs and system caches. They can also repair disk permissions, just like the built-in OS X Disk Utility application: when these are incorrect they can slow down some applications, cause them to stop working properly and even cause them to stop running at all, so it’s worth running this operation from time to time.

Speeding up your network
Networking is complicated. Whenever you’re connected to a network or the Internet, you’re sending thousands and thousands of pieces of discrete information from your Mac to its destination and receiving similar amounts of information back. But if you’re on a dial-up connection, the amount of information you can send in one go is far more limited than it is if you’re on broadband, which is still slower than the network in your company.

OS X has network settings optimised for the average situation, so if you’ve a fast broadband or network connection, your Mac will probably be sending out less information in one go than it could – and that means it’ll be slower. To get a speed boost, you can use Cocktail to optimise your Mac’s networking settings to suit your network, and it will install a start-up item that will change them every time you restart your Mac.

Advanced speed techniques
So you’ve got the hang of the basics, now. You’ve cleaned up your Mac’s hard drive, you’ve put in more memory, you’ve wiped out programs and files you don’t need, and you’ve quit all the programs and processes that might be slowing down your Mac. But it’s still not fast enough. What else can you do?

You might still be able to squeeze a few more drops of speed out of your Mac as it is. Even simple menubar items can take up processor speed, so removing unnecessary ones will give you a slight speed boost. Removing any foots you might have installed with Font Book will speed things up considerably. Playing with Safari’s cache settings can make it go faster. If you have the option of using a hard drive as network storage, perhaps by connecting it to an Apple Extreme Base Station or a Time Capsule, take advantage of that instead of plugging it in to your Mac: USB 2.0 uses some of your Mac’s processing power so disconnecting the hard drive will stop that drain and if you have a wireless n or gigabit Ethernet network, you shouldn’t notice much if any speed difference when copying files to a networked storage device instead.

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5 | All 5 Pages