“Over the years, I’ve repaired many computers. Most people just ask me to speed it up,” Jacob Penderworth writes for Tuts+. “I usually ensure they have enough RAM to run the latest version of OS X, update everything, clean out some caches if the hard drive is near full, and advise they reorganize things. I usually don’t have to mention the Desktop, unless it’s really bad. And I’ve seen some bad ones. Hundreds of little icons. These people have adjusted the icon size to 16×16 pixels just to fit it all on the display. The thing is, they probably don’t know how much it slows down their Mac.”
“Quick Look is one of my favorite features in OS X,” Penderworth writes. “While Quick Look is a fantastic tool to have, it will be your enemy if you keep Pages or Word documents, images, videos, music with artwork, and anything else it supports previewing on the Desktop. The tool is always ready with previews, so when you have a lot of documents on the Desktop, all those previews will have to be temporarily stored in the RAM. This means your Mac can become extremely slow.”
“Putting things on your Desktop because it’s easy is not a sound, productive or organizational strategy. In fact, it’s one of the messiest ways to store things on the Mac,” Penderworth writes. “Apple gave you folders like Documents, Music, and Pictures for a reason. There’s no need to create your own… [With a clean Desktop] the battery life will last longer, the computer will be faster, Finder won’t hate you, and so on.”
Read more in the full article here.
