Speed up your Mac

• Article 71 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2009

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But the simplest thing to do, if you have the time and the backup space, is to reformat your Mac’s hard drive with Disk Utility on your Mac’s boot DVD or CD, reinstall all the applications then restore your data. Over time, your Mac’s files will be rewritten by OS X, and occasionally broken up into separate pieces. Having to search all over the hard drive for the parts of files will slow it down, and although OS X does have a built-in file defragmenter that puts all the file pieces back together again, it’s not 100% efficient. If you reformat your hard drive and reinstall OS X, your applications and your data, the restored files won’t be fragmented and your Mac will be able to access them faster. And even if you’ve done as thorough a job as possible in clearing your hard drive and your Mac’s secret files, a reformat and reinstall guarantees only the necessary files will be present on your drive.

Time Machine, although it doesn’t back up every system file, will copy all your data and preferences; but for a true back up, Carbon Copy Cloner (http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html) is your best bet. Don’t forget, if you have a Boot Camp partition, that you need to reformat just the Mac partition, not the whole drive.

But before you do that reinstall, it’s worth asking yourself if a new hard drive might be a wise purchase, given that most speed bottlenecks are down to how quickly your Mac can get data off the hard drive. One of the main factors that affects how fast that can occur is the speed the hard drive’s disks rotate at: while modern Macs tend to have drives that rotate at 7,500rpm (revolutions per minute), older Macs – particularly laptops – have drives that rotate at slower speeds, typically 4,000rpm; there are also faster drives on the market at relatively low cost that rotate at 10,000rpm.

Switching out your old hard drive for a new, faster hard drive will undoubtedly give you a speed boost as well as more storage space. However, this isn’t for the faint-hearted, since you’ll need to get the right kind (most modern Macs use SATA drives) as well as the right size (laptops, Mac minis and iMacs need much thinner drives than desktops), and it will involve disassembling your Mac. In some cases, this won’t be possible because the design of the Mac won’t allow anyone but a qualified engineer to access the hard drives.

You can go to a qualified Mac engineer and ask them to switch out your drive, although there will be a labour cost – typically £40-80 – as well as the cost of a new drive, with the compact drives used by laptops and iMacs costing more than those used by Mac Pros and Power Macs.

For those with nerves of steel and a suitable Mac, there are other, ultimate hardware upgrade options available, although these can be expensive and perilous. Certain Macs graphic cards are replaceable, so if you find a game playing a little slower than you’d like, a better graphics card can accelerate the speed at which the picture is redrawn and give you a smoother playing experience. You can also switch processors, either through replacing the original processor or through a CPU upgrade card, although only Power Mac G3s and G4s as well as even older Power Macs have this option.

Since Intel Core Duo and Core Duo 2 processors use the same socket to connect to the Mac’s ‘motherboard’, if you have a Macintel, it is possible to buy a faster chip, open your Mac and swap out the existing CPU. However, this can be tricky with certain designs – such as the Mac mini – and will inevitably invalidate any warranty you might still have, so again, you (or an Apple engineer) will need to take a good deal of care. Faster CPUs also tend to create more heat, so although Macs have the tolerance and ventilation necessary to withstand this, if you’ve been lax about letting your Mac have a decent air supply, you might find it crashing because it’s overheating. But boy do they give you a speed boost.

Better network configuration
Network misconfiguration can often slow down Internet browsing speed. You might have a wireless network and a faster wired network but if your Mac uses the wireless network first, it won’t be able to take advantage of the wired network’s higher speed. So it’s worth making sure that your Mac’s network interfaces are in the right order in the Network pane in Systems Preferences: you can reorder them using the pulldown menu at the bottom of the screen.

Even a well-configured network can be made to go faster. Your Mac has to look up the Internet address of any web site before you go to it, using its DNS settings, which are also configured in the Network pane. These are usually provided by your ISP and configured automatically, but you can use the following settings instead – 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.200 – to take advantage of the faster OpenDNS (www.opendns.com) servers.

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