Speed up your Mac

• Article 71 of 89
• MacFormat, July 2009

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“Faster, Mac, faster!” Just about everyone at one point or another has found themselves staring at the spinning rainbow beachball of doom and wished their Mac was just that little bit more powerful. Whether it’s simply speed or the fact your music, video and photo collections have now whittled what you thought was a massive hard drive down to just a gig or so, what felt fast and roomy when you bought it has somehow become tired and claustrophobic.

So is it time to buy a new Mac?

Not necessarily. Although new is always nice, it’s also expensive and there are a whole range of things you can do to speed up your Mac and free up space on its hard drive that won’t cost you a penny – or maybe a few pennies but not a whole new Mac’s worth.

Over the next few pages, we’re going to show you how to make quite massive potential savings and get the most from your current Mac. The first steps will be learning to identify the causes of most Mac slowdowns and hard drive clutter. Then, once you know where to look and what to look for, we’ll show you some tools that can help you to get rid of that clutter and performance hogs.

Of course, not everything is clutter and if your Mac is already as lean and mean as you can get it, it may be time to help it grow with some new hardware – we’ll take you through the best purchase you can make.

Where did all my space go?
There are two things to be clear about when talking about Mac performance: memory and hard drive space. Memory or RAM is the thing that your Mac uses for storing applications when it’s running them; your hard drive is where your Mac stores applications and your other files, including music, photos and videos.

Most Macs come with what sounds like a phenomenal amount of space compared to Macs of even a few years ago: a new MacBook will have 120GB of space. Yet that space goes quickly, particularly if you put your Mac to heavy use.

This isn’t just a problem if you want to keep adding pictures, videos, applications or music to your Mac; your Mac’s memory may run out if you’re using more than a few applications at the same – if it does, your Mac will try to use its hard drive for additional memory by creating a ‘swap’ file, so you need to keep at least some of it free. Some programs also create temporary files that the program needs while they’re running, even if they end up deleting them later; if you don’t have enough hard drive space for the temporary files, you won’t be able to use them, even if the final files would fit on your hard drive quite nicely, thank you. These temporary files can be just a few kilobytes in size, with Microsoft Word, for example, but with something like iDVD or Roxio’s Toast, you’ll need gigabytes of temporary space to burn a DVD, let alone a Blu-Ray disk.

Probably the best way to prevent your Mac’s hard drive space filling up without your realising it is to know where all your files are. Your Mac has a system of folders designed to keep file organisation easy and provided you stick to it, you’ll always know what’s taking up space and whether you can need to take easy or drastic measures to solve your space problems. Better still, by storing certain files in the right places, your Mac will gain extra functions it wouldn’t otherwise have.

There should be just a few folders in the ‘root’ or top level of your hard drive. For most people, these will be: ‘Applications’, ‘Library’, ‘System’ and ‘Users’; anyone with a Mac old enough to run OS 9 or Classic will have a ‘System Folder’, a folder for their OS 9 applications and an alias to their OS 9 desktop folder, while anyone who’s installed the OS X Developer tools will have a ‘Developer’ folder as well. There are other, normally invisible folders used by the UNIX parts of OS X, such as ‘usr’ and ‘var’, but unless you know what they’re for and why you might not need them any more, touching them is a very bad idea.

As you might suspect, ‘Applications’ should contain all your applications and ‘Users’ contains all of your files and the files of anyone else who uses your Mac. ‘System’ is sacrosanct and reserved for Apple’s use – as with the invisible UNIX folders, never touch the contents of ‘System’ unless you know exactly what you’re doing, or you risk making your Mac either very error-prone or unable to work at all. ‘Library’ is a catch all collection of files that your Mac and its applications need for extra functions, preferences, templates, desktop pictures, plug-ins and more.

Keeping all your applications in the Applications folder not only ensures that when it comes to removing applications you no longer need, you know where they are without ferreting around, it gives your Mac extra capabilities through its ‘Services’ menu, available from the program menu (so if you’re in the Finder, the menu called ‘Finder’); for example, if you use Skype, you’re able to highlight names or text in applications and call the Skype user with that name using the Services menu. If there’s more than one user on your Mac and you want to ensure only certain applications are available only to you, you can also create an Applications folder in your home folder and any programs you store there will be able to offer Services to other applications.

Your home folder is stored in the ‘Users’ folder, together with a ‘Shared’ folder that should be used for storing files that all users should be able to access: certain badly behaved programs also use it for storing preferences and other files. Normally, though, the Shared folder isn’t something that builds up too many files.

Instead, it’s the folders in your home directory that are the usual source of bloat. What with iTunes storing all its music and videos in the ‘Music’ folder, iMovie storing its files in the ‘Movies’ folder and iPhoto storing its library in the ‘Pictures’, you can pretty much be guaranteed that your home directory will have the bulk of the files on your hard drive before too long. However, like the Mac, you have a ‘Library’ folder of your own, which can also fill up pretty quickly as you use more and more applications.

Files, folders and packages
Everyone knows what a file is and that you can stick files inside but folders. But what’s a package? A package is a clever way in which OS X is able to make a whole load of files and folders appear as a single file to make it easier to move its contents about. The majority of OS X applications are packages and you can see this by right-clicking on one and choosing “Show Package Contents” from the menu.

Why is this helpful to know? Many OS X applications are ‘fat’ (run on Classic and OS X) or Universal (run on PowerPC and Intel Macs) binaries, or come in a variety of languages. To make life easier for users, developers stick all these varieties together into one package. However, that can lead to a waste of hard drive space; once you know what all the parts of a package do, you can remove the parts that aren’t appropriate for your Mac and save gigabytes of space.

Invisible files
OS X has plenty of clever tricks, some of you which it’s easy to forget – running UNIX applications, having different view options for every window, being able to store Mac files on Window disks, and so on. To do this, it stores a number of files all over your disks, but to save you from yourself and accidents – and to make everything prettier – Apple hides these files.

These files can build up over time and since some applications also create invisible files – and sometimes forget to delete them – it’s worth your while looking at these files to see if they’re worth keeping. The quickest way to show invisible files is with Terminal. Type ‘defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 1; killall Finder’ and press Return; changing 1 to 0 will hide them again. In particular, .DS_Store files, which store window view preferences can quickly add up to megs of wasted space.

Freeing up space
So your hard drive is clogged up and you know what’s doing the clogging up. What now?

Depending on what the cause is, you can either delete files or move them if you have somewhere else to store them. Your Mac can almost certainly burn CDs and DVDs unless it’s very old: you can use the Finder to archive files you still want but don’t need on your hard drive onto disk, before you delete them from your drive. You can either do this by creating a Burn Folder using the Finder and dragging files to archive into the folder, or simply selecting a folder or file and selecting ‘Burn xxx to Disc…’ from the File menu.

Since almost nothing still needs Classic or OS 9 these days, it’s usually a safe move to delete the ‘Applications (OS 9)’ folder if you still have it and ‘System Folder’: your Mac might object in the latter case, but you can override it by launching Terminal from your ‘Utilities’ folder in the ‘Applications’ folder, typing ‘sudo rm -R ‘ then dragging ‘System Folder’ onto the Terminal window from the Finder and pressing Return. This should free about 750MB of space when it’s done.

DVDs do take a long time to burn and you obviously need a decent cataloguing system if you’re to keep track of all your files. A quicker alternative that will give you immediate access to all your files is an external hard drive. Currently, you can buy a 500GB USB 2.0 external hard drive from most electrical stores for under £80, plug it into your Mac and it will appear on your desktop. Most come formatted as Windows NTFS drives, so you’ll need to re-format them first using Disk Utility to be able to use them. Once formatted, you then simply copy any files that are hogging space onto the drive and delete the original files from your Mac. Firewire drives are typically twice the price but will work at an acceptable speed with older Macs that don’t have USB 2.0. There are also ‘networked storage’ drives such as the Buffalo LinkStation that cost almost the same price as a USB drive but, have Gigabit ethernet connections so are as quick but can be available to all Macs on a network if you plug them into your router. You can make just about any external USB drive act as a networked storage drive by plugging it into an AirPort Extreme Base Station or Time Capsule.

Moving your iTunes or iPhoto libraries to an external drive is relatively easy. With iPhoto, just copy the ‘iPhoto Library’ file or folder from the ‘Pictures’ folder to the external drive then hold down the alt or option key when you start up iPhoto – you’ll be prompted to locate iPhoto’s library and you can choose the copy on your external drive. You can follow the same procedure with iTunes and its library, by copying the ‘iTunes’ folder in the ‘Music’ folder then locating the ‘iTunes Library’ file inside it when prompted by iTunes.

Deleting applications isn’t quite as easy. Many applications can be installed simply by dragging them into the ‘Applications’ folder, so you’d think uninstalling them completely would be as easy as dragging them to the Trash. However, many applications, on first launch, will create preferences in the ‘Preferences’ folders of your ‘Library’, may install more files into folders in your ‘Application Support’ folders in your ‘Library’ folders or directly into their own folders in the ‘Library’ folders. They might also create ‘caches’ – collections of files designed to speed up performance of applications – in your ‘Library’ folder’s caches folders. Other applications that use an installer can place files in many other places around your system. Typically, you’ll recognise which files and folders belong to which applications as you browse the Library folders since they’ll have the application or developer name in their title or enclosing folder title – if they don’t, try Get Info (Apple-I) on the file, since sometimes you’ll find copyright messages in the file information.

However, if the application came with an uninstaller, use that to delete the application rather than trying to do it manually. Equally, if you’re just trying to delete a single application, if it used a standard OS X installer package, you can find out what files it installed using Pacifist (http://www.charelessoft.com) or by running the installer again (see Quick tips 1 and 2).

Another option is Smith Micro’s Spring Cleaning (http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/springcleaning/index.html), which is an uninstaller application and file scanner. This can keep track of new files on your Mac, work out which files belong to which applications and let you look for particular kinds of files, such as movies, which haven’t been stored in the right places.

If you don’t want to delete an application altogether, it is possible to save at least some space by deleting some of its language files: OS X as well as many applications include duplicate files but in French, German and other languages. Applications such as Monolingual (http://monolingual.sourceforge.net) can delete as many languages from applications as you want, saving you potentially gigabytes of hard drive space – although some applications, such as Adobe Creative Suite, might stop working properly if you delete language files so it can be quite risky in some cases.

Speeding up your Mac
Your Mac’s memory or RAM is the biggest cause of performance issues. You need enough to run OS X and any applications you want to open. If the memory available isn’t enough, your Mac will use your hard drive for ‘virtual’ memory so that you can still run your applications. However, since the hard drive is much slower than real memory, performance will drop.

As a rule of thumb, the absolute minimum amount of RAM you should think of having for running Leopard with is 1GB, with 2GB for comfortable running, more if you can install more and you’re using programs like Adobe Creative Suite.

You can find out how much RAM you have installed in your Mac, by choosing “About this Mac…” from the Apple menu. If you have too little memory installed, go to http://www.crucial.com/uk/mac/index.aspx and download the Crucial System Scanner Tool, which will tell you what you have already and what you’ll be able to add, if anything.

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.

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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