“The only place I like seeing a beach ball is at a beach or in a stadium during a baseball game or concert,” Matt Elliott writes for CNET.
“The one place I least like to see a beach ball is on my aging MacBook Pro, where the spinning beach ball has become an altogether too familiar a sight,” Elliott writes. “If your Mac has become frustratingly slow, there are a number of ways you can speed it up again.”
Elliott writes, “Before you engage in any maintenance, I would urge you to take caution and back up your data. For Macs, it’s easy: grab an external drive and run Time Machine. With your Mac’s drive freshly backed up, you may proceed.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A good overview of the basics to keeping your Mac running as well as it can.
Every article on the internet aimed at speeding up your Mac says to delete unused files from your drive. That’s just BS. Files sitting on mass storage don’t affect the perceived of a computer at all. As soon as I see that, the rest of what they wrote is suspicious–all credibility lost.
The best way to speed up your Mac is to buy one of the speedy, just announced ones.
Oh wait…
2010 Mac Pro hexacore 3.33 GHz processor, maxed out at 32 GB RAM. Running Mercury SSD startup drive from OWC to improve responsiveness. Zero startup items. Sometimes it just flies, better than any other Mac I’ve used including 2016 models.
But not always. Some apps are just a mess. iTunes is a frequent offender. Have seen occasional beach balls from day one and they are not getting any less frequent. Each release of OS X since Snow Leopard seemed to get worse, actually. The number of times Apple phones home with its software for no known reason is mind boggling. Apple is getting more like Microsoft every day.
I don’t think moving to a cylindrical Mac is the answer, either.
Replaced my hard drive and optical drive with SSDs from OWC and maxed out the 16GB RAM in my early 2011 13″ MacBook Pro and have no issues. I simply don’t see that blasted spinning ball anymore.
SSD is the most effective way to speed up an old mac. Made my 2009 Mac mini usable again. RAM can help but really only has a limited effect.
Are related to Finder, and its inability to function properly.
seriously its the worst.
Try Pathfinder as an alternative for 30 days, and you’ll see what I mean..
Finder is a POS.
The best possible solution to speed up a slow Mac is using a 3rd party tool like Stellar Speedup Mac. This application can easily identify and remove the useless files and make a slow macOS to run faster.