“Macs are solid machines, but just like their owners they have a tendency to get lethargic as they age,” Adam Rosen writes for Cult of Mac. “Launching and switching programs takes longer, simple tasks become arduous, and the dreaded beach ball of doom appears more often than it did when your machine was new. The operating system just starts to feel crufty, and can get worse over time. I see these issues in my IT consulting business regularly.”
“You may be asking, why does this happen? There are many reasons, but some are more common than others,” Rosen writes. “Sometimes your hard disk (or solid-state drive) gets too full and interferes with normal computer operations. Crashes or misbehaving programs can corrupt the disk directory or application cache files. Remnants from old software may still be running behind the scenes, or you don’t have enough RAM to deal with your OS and workflow.”
“Is there some sort of tune-up you can do to sort it out? Your tech always tells you to just reboot the computer, but there’s got to be more than that,” Rosen writes. “The good news: Yes, there are some things you can do. And, perhaps, adopt some more efficient computing practices for yourself along the way.”
Read more in the full article here.
Go back to Snow Leopard. Problem solved.
I’m joking, but it’s also true for the most part.
What do you mean “go back to”? I’m still running Snow Leopard on my main production MBP.
🙂
Most of what has happened since Snow Leopard has added a layer of questionable (Twitter and Facebook integration comes to mind) crap to the basic platform and created a huge overburden.
Lion for me seems to be as stable and productive as anything else I’ve tried.
I’ve used all the previous OSX since 10.2 and tried 10.8 & 10.9 at the Mac Store many times, but haven’t seen a new “killer feature” to get me to upgrade yet. Yosemite will push me over the top, however.
I’m hoping that I may be able to upgrade to Yosemite but I’m not going to hold my breath. I do audio work and Mavericks sucks in that regards. My apps and other hardware are fine on Snow Leopard so it hasn’t been a big deal. The app upgrades that work on the latest OSs don’t really add much to my workflow so I’ve just held onto SL.
I am running OS X 10.8.x and 10.9.x on multiple Macs at home (2007 iMac, 2008 iMac, 2011 MBA, 2012 MBP) without a hitch. I have also used Macs at work for many years with few issues, and I can say with great confidence that Microsoft products have been the primary source of those few issues. As an exception to that rule, I recently experienced a MBP HDD corruption problem caused by a mandatory third party full disk encryption program.
I am sorry for your problems, but I am glad that I do not share them and my Macs have generally operated problem free for the past 25 years. Please do not extrapolate your problems to the general Mac user base.
What’s this ??? An article about Macs on MDN????? rarity these days!!!!!!!!!!
Showing little understanding of how Unix manages memory I see no reason to recommend this article. The only salient point that didn’t get dumbed down too far was the need for disk space. Since Unix swaps out programs that aren’t being used you need enough free hard drive space to allow Unix to swap things in and out freely. I believe Apple’s rule of thumb remains at 10% of your hard drive capacity. Activity Monitor has a nice Memory display that helps you visually know if upgrading your memory will be helpful. Green = good, yellow/orange = concern, red = bad. And just for grins, I quit from Preview, checked my memory usage (13.34GB used, 23.04GB VM) Then I asked Finder/Spotlight to show me all my PDF documents and I selected and opened *56* of them with Preview. Activity Monitor showed memory used go up to 13.61GB and then since I switched away from Preview and Unix did what it is supposed to, memory used dropped back to 13.37GB used.
Good article! I have used several of these tips and they work.
> Macs are solid machines, but just like their owners they have a tendency to get lethargic as they age…
What a terrible and pessimistic analogy.
Terrible. Many things in life actually get better with age, including some of us ‘decrepit owners’. 🙂
Sadly, I can almost identify with that. But I just can’t find the energy.
I wish I could go back to mountain lion, don’t like mavericks
When my mac gets on (usually after I’ve mucked around with it), I fire up the recovery partition. Then, I open the terminal, rename the applications folder, the library folder, and the users folder. I delete everything else, install a fresh system and move back all the stuff I want to retain and delete what’s left of the old folders. Kind of like an archive an install in the disc era.
Great article pity most mac users are like mushroom not advised, kept in the dark, fed manure by Apple and car salesmen like Mackeeper.
Too keep you mac running fast:
Never fill you drive more than 2/3rds
Get a real system monitoring dashboard like Menumeters
(You would not drive a car without a dashboard why drive your mac and not no what the disk, memory, processor or network i/o is doing on your machine at all times)
If your work flow envolves creating and moving files on and off your machine buy Diskwarrior but install it on an external fireware 800 or thunderbolt Bootable system.
Get a cache cleaner like Onyx that also checks for S.M.A.R.T hard drive failure (a chip your hd or ssd that keeps a score of unrecoverable errors). This is most infuriating part of all the crap Apple say we need in an operating system, they have no active SMART software to tell you your drive is FAILING!!!! This would be like a car manufacturer not putting in an oil light, you know your computer is running slow SMART on you drive will actually reduce speed of your drive, resulting in slow boot and lots of beach ball activity. The only plausible reason I have come up with for why a simple notification software is not built in is so msot users will take thier machine to a “genuis bar” where Apple will have the oppertunity to sell you a new machine. How many people have lost all thier data becuase thier backup was not working and the operating system did not tell them there was something mechanically wrong with thier machine. I truely believe Apple is leaving its self open too a big legal class action becuase of negligence vs more sales.
More ram, 4gb minimum and not significant gains over 12gb
A clean install, format and move over mail, ical, addres, user files but not migrate all the preferences and cache.
I had an unbearably slow mid 2010 15″ MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM running Mavericks. I had performed all the standard maintenance tricks on it, culminating in reinstalling OS and moving back user data by hand. Nothing made any markable difference.
I finally decided to do some plumbing: toss the DVD drive, move the HD in a caddy into the DVD slot and put an SSD where the HD had been. Then I merged the SSD and HD into an Apple Fusion Drive. This made the MBP as fast as it once had been right out of the box, while adding 128GB storage capacity.
My 2009 iMac had the same issues, I did the same procedure on it, which had the same excellent results. BTW, here I replaced the original 1TB HD with a 2TB HD, ending up with a 2.2TB Fusion Drive.
Later on I doubled RAM to the maximum possible 8GB in both machines, but that didn’t much boost speed, just maintained it with more apps open.