Wired’s How-To Wiki recently put up an article on how to speed up your Mac. A lot of it is just regular maintenance such as deleting unused applications and clearing the caches of your web browsers and uninstalling plug-ins that aren’t often used, but there are a few tips in there that stand out as news to me.
Did you know that many widgets use your RAM even when Dashboard isn’t open? Open up Activity monitor and check to see if you are currently using any of these widgets. If you are, then ask, “Do I really need a widget that tells me where I can find the Gemini constellation in the night sky?”.
Another Interesting fact is that a cluttered desktop bogs down performance. OS X treats each individual icon as an open window. This means each icon will eat up a minute amount of RAM. If you only have a few, this shouldn’t affect your machine’s performance, but for those of you with dozens of icons on your desktop, think about grouping them into folders.
The amount of free space on your hard drive is also a huge factor in how well your computer runs. If your hard drive is around 90% full you will notice a huge decrease in performance. In this scenario you should either upgrade it, or clear out some space by deleting unused languages and applications or moving photos and videos onto an external hard drive.
Along with the list of how to speed up your Mac, there is also a brief list of actions which will not speed up your Mac. These are tips which are often suggested by tech support forum members which, in reality, don’t do anything, such as repairing file permissions
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