“Enterprise, creative or home user — everyone with a Mac should learn a few simple steps they can take to tweak a little more performance from their Apple machine. This short collection provides an essential guide,” Jonny Evans writes for Computerworld.
“Take a look at Activity Monitor (Fastest way to open the app? Command-Space>Type Activity Monitor, tap Return),” Evans writes. “This illustrates how your Mac is running. Look at the CPU and Memory columns to see if you can recognize an application that seems to be demanding a lot from your system. If there is, just quit that app until next time you need it.”
“macOS has some really helpful built-in tools to help you boost Mac performance by getting rid of items you no longer need,” Evans writes. “Open About this Mac in the Menu and tap Storage to access these. Wait a few moments, and you should see a visual representation that shows what is taking up space on your system. That’s interesting, but to get to the tools tap Manage.”
More simple, effective tips in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A good overview of the simple ways to keep your Mac running at the peak of its performance capabilities.
External SSD drive connected to a Thunderbolt port. Put new zip into my aging iMac. The new iMacs just don’t have enough to justify their prices, IMHO.
Fair enough. A switch from HDD to SSD will certainly wake up an older Mac. Back around 1999 I sped up my old PowerMac with a G3 card for a couple of hundred bucks. At the time, it was a bargain.
Eventually, you will want/need a new Mac. Until then, enjoy the extended life of your SSD-enhanced iMac. More power to you.
Rebuild Desktop.
Remove unneeded Control Panels.
Zap PRAM
Use double-sided 800k floppies.
Your Mac will run like a champ.
The good old days. Not to mention all the odd finger combinations when rebooting and counting chimes.
Use Font/DA Mover to remove unused fonts and desk accessories!
Conflict Catcher was gold. We could go on and on… 🙂
Daring Mac technos of course delve into the Library folders to ferret out crap that’s loading at boot and account login. (No, I’m not sharing, so as to protect newbies).
I was also surprised to find my VPN client was eating my bandwidth even when it was not activated. Therefore, I only boot it when I need it. (It was constantly pinging all its servers for uptime verification).
Cisco, perhaps? POS!