5 Easy Ways To Speed Up Your Mac

**Tips to Slow Down Your Mac**

If you're experiencing slow performance on your Mac, there are several simple steps you can take to speed it up. One way to do this is to simply let the system complete its tasks without interrupting it. When you're waiting for a file to copy or a backup to finish, try not to click on anything else while it's running, as this can slow it down further.

Another tip is to leave the Activity Monitor alone while it's doing its job. This utility provides valuable information about what's going on with your system, but if you start messing around with it, you might get a spinning beach ball cursor. Instead of interacting with it, try just leaving it be and let it do its thing.

If you're experiencing errors with disk permissions, the Activity Monitor can help repair them automatically. Simply let the Activity Monitor run for a bit, and it should smooth out many issues you may have been experiencing with your OS.

**Optimizing Login Time**

If you're experiencing slow login times on your Mac, there are several steps you can take to optimize this process. One of the simplest ways is to check the Login Items tab in System Preferences. This section lists all the applications that start automatically when you log in. If you see any applications that you don't need or use frequently, consider disabling them from starting up on login.

For example, if you don't really use Dropbox much, you can select it and click the minus button to remove it from the list. The fewer applications that start running on login, the quicker your Mac will log in and be ready to work. However, this doesn't mean you should get rid of all your Login Items altogether – just those that don't serve a purpose or are taking up valuable resources.

**Dashboard: A Resource Hog**

Another common culprit when it comes to slowing down your Mac is the Dashboard widget menu. This feature allows you to customize your dashboard with various widgets, but if you have too many installed, it can take up significant RAM and processing power. If you really like having a lot of widgets on your dashboard, consider using the plus button in the corner to add only the ones you need.

However, if you find that your Mac is slowing down due to the Dashboard widget menu, there's an easy way to disable it completely. To do this, open Spotlight and search for Terminal (you can also type "terminal" into Spotlight). Once the Terminal window opens, type in a string of text that appears at the bottom of the screen: `defaults write com.apple.dashboard MCX X Disabled -bool true`. Press Enter to submit the command.

After submitting the command, you'll need to quit Terminal and try pressing your Dashboard button (or clicking on it). If everything works as expected, you should not see the dashboard appear. This will free up resources and help speed up your Mac.

**Additional Tips**

Finally, here are a few more tips that can help speed up your Mac:

* Regularly cleaning out your downloads folder and other temporary files can help reduce clutter and free up space on your hard drive.

* Consider using a solid-state drive (SSD) instead of a traditional hard drive. SSDs are significantly faster than traditional hard drives and can make a big difference in terms of performance.

By following these simple tips, you can help speed up your Mac and make it run more efficiently. Whether you're looking to optimize login times or simply free up resources, there's something on this list for everyone.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone today I'm going to show you five ways to speed up your Mac and while these might seem like minor settings when you first apply them you'll be surprised at how much they actually improve the performance over time of your back so the first one and it's probably the most obvious but it's occasionally overlooked is you want a lot of space on your boot drive at least 10% ideally 20% % so if you look here I have a 250 GB hard drive I have 70 GB free it's enough it could be more but the more space that you have on your hard drive generally the faster your computer's going to be that's pretty much kind of how it works bottom line that's what it is so if you have any stuff on your computer that you don't really need or you think you can get rid of and you know just don't throw stuff away just to get rid of it but you know what I mean get rid of it because it will speed up your Mac and if you have under 10% of your hard drive available you really need to do this because you'll notice extraordinary performance improvements now the second tip is probably the most overlooked of them all but it can be the easiest one of them all as well clean up your desktop if you have icons scattered all over your desktop normally I keep mine very clean as you can see here I have one folder that sits on my secondary monitor here but that's it the more stuff you have on your desktop the slower your computer will run because it has to render all those icons in your desktop and it slows finder way down so if you take all that junk on your desktop and just put it in one folder like I do it's going to be faster it's going to be more efficient finder is going to run quicker it's going to start up way quicker and it's probably the most overlooking it's such a simple thing too that people probably don't even realize they should do the third tip is repairing your permissions so to do this you have to launch disc utility so you can search for it up in spot Spotlight search dis utility and pop it open now in dis utility you are going to be repairing your permissions and you'll do this on your main hard drive so I'm just going to select my hard drive here Macintosh HD and you can see right here I can repair my dis permissions now it's just one click and it'll repair uh this process takes a while you might want to leave your computer for a little while because you really don't really want to do much else while it's repairing the permissions um first of all it does slow it down while it's doing it you might get the spinning beach ball cursor um but secondly it's just best to leave it alone while it's doing it so you know budget a little bit of time if you're going to do this but it's just a simple thing you might want to do every couple months if there's any errors with the disc permissions it'll just repair them all and it should um smooth out a lot of issues you might have with the OS and another good tip if you're having problems with slow login times um if you head into system preferences and you click on the accounts Tab and then go under the login items tab in there uh you're going to see all your login items and these are all the applications that run as soon as you log in so when you type your password and hit enter all these things start loading and if you notice your computer's being unresponsive for a period of time at login this could be a problem if you have a lot of items in here you um you know if you see any that you don't really need to start up um let's say for example I don't really use dropbox that much so I'm not going to you know have it run on Startup anymore I can just select it hit the minus button and it will not start up on login anymore and the less things you have start up on login the typically the quicker your computer is going to log in and be ready to work I'm not saying you should just get rid of all your login items just because it'll speed up your computer I mean they're nice to have uh but if you really don't need ones running why bother having them taking up RAM and processing power and things like that it just doesn't really make sense so they will build up over time if you install um different menu bar applications and stuff and you just kind of forget about them that stuff's all going to be uh still running when you log in and simply disabling these from running at login can really save you quite a bit of time on boot up and speaking of taking extra RAM and processing power dashboard is one of the big biggest biggest resource Hogs that you probably don't even realize that's on your system um the more widgets you have it takes up more RAM and you know just having dashboard run will dramatically slow on your computer under certain circumstances so if you really like dashboard you can click the plus button down in the corner here and maybe get rid of some of the widgets you don't use much you know I don't think I've ever done a Google search from dashboard I'll get rid of that and you know maybe I I don't really use the calculator in there either so I can just get rid of that but if you really never use dashboard at all and you want to get rid of it completely of course you can always bring it back but if you want to get rid of it you can actually disable it so that when you press the dashboard button or click on the dashboard application icon nothing will happen and it's not gone forever you can just type in a command and get it back but I'll show you what to do to disable dashboard completely so I'm going to go up into Spotlight and I'm going to search for terminal and open that up and in the terminal window I'm going to write a string of text and I'll have it spelled it at the bottom of the screen uh pretty big so you can read it and I'll also uh type it out here for you so it is defaults space write space com. apple. dasboard oops space MCX X Das disabled space minus Boolean space then all caps yes and you're going to hit enter and then you're going to type in kill all as one word space capital D OC K so kill all Doc hit enter again your Doc's going to disappear for a minute and then it's going to come back and dashboard will be disabled so if I quit terminal here and I press my dashboard button on the keyboard you can't see it but but nothing's happening I can go into my applications folder click on dashboard right here nothing happens So dashboard's Gone and what's not gone is your RAM and your processing power that's all given back to you because all those widgets are not running in the background uh tap taking up you know the valuable processing power you need to do actual work so those are five easy ways that you can really uh speed up your Mac and they may not seem like much but they really add up and I also think they're probably the most five overlooked um kind of most obvious but people never think of them kind of ways uh to speed up your Mac and they really do help out and I find them to be really helpful on my Mac so I hope you'll find them helpful too and I hope you found this video useful thank you for watchinghey everyone today I'm going to show you five ways to speed up your Mac and while these might seem like minor settings when you first apply them you'll be surprised at how much they actually improve the performance over time of your back so the first one and it's probably the most obvious but it's occasionally overlooked is you want a lot of space on your boot drive at least 10% ideally 20% % so if you look here I have a 250 GB hard drive I have 70 GB free it's enough it could be more but the more space that you have on your hard drive generally the faster your computer's going to be that's pretty much kind of how it works bottom line that's what it is so if you have any stuff on your computer that you don't really need or you think you can get rid of and you know just don't throw stuff away just to get rid of it but you know what I mean get rid of it because it will speed up your Mac and if you have under 10% of your hard drive available you really need to do this because you'll notice extraordinary performance improvements now the second tip is probably the most overlooked of them all but it can be the easiest one of them all as well clean up your desktop if you have icons scattered all over your desktop normally I keep mine very clean as you can see here I have one folder that sits on my secondary monitor here but that's it the more stuff you have on your desktop the slower your computer will run because it has to render all those icons in your desktop and it slows finder way down so if you take all that junk on your desktop and just put it in one folder like I do it's going to be faster it's going to be more efficient finder is going to run quicker it's going to start up way quicker and it's probably the most overlooking it's such a simple thing too that people probably don't even realize they should do the third tip is repairing your permissions so to do this you have to launch disc utility so you can search for it up in spot Spotlight search dis utility and pop it open now in dis utility you are going to be repairing your permissions and you'll do this on your main hard drive so I'm just going to select my hard drive here Macintosh HD and you can see right here I can repair my dis permissions now it's just one click and it'll repair uh this process takes a while you might want to leave your computer for a little while because you really don't really want to do much else while it's repairing the permissions um first of all it does slow it down while it's doing it you might get the spinning beach ball cursor um but secondly it's just best to leave it alone while it's doing it so you know budget a little bit of time if you're going to do this but it's just a simple thing you might want to do every couple months if there's any errors with the disc permissions it'll just repair them all and it should um smooth out a lot of issues you might have with the OS and another good tip if you're having problems with slow login times um if you head into system preferences and you click on the accounts Tab and then go under the login items tab in there uh you're going to see all your login items and these are all the applications that run as soon as you log in so when you type your password and hit enter all these things start loading and if you notice your computer's being unresponsive for a period of time at login this could be a problem if you have a lot of items in here you um you know if you see any that you don't really need to start up um let's say for example I don't really use dropbox that much so I'm not going to you know have it run on Startup anymore I can just select it hit the minus button and it will not start up on login anymore and the less things you have start up on login the typically the quicker your computer is going to log in and be ready to work I'm not saying you should just get rid of all your login items just because it'll speed up your computer I mean they're nice to have uh but if you really don't need ones running why bother having them taking up RAM and processing power and things like that it just doesn't really make sense so they will build up over time if you install um different menu bar applications and stuff and you just kind of forget about them that stuff's all going to be uh still running when you log in and simply disabling these from running at login can really save you quite a bit of time on boot up and speaking of taking extra RAM and processing power dashboard is one of the big biggest biggest resource Hogs that you probably don't even realize that's on your system um the more widgets you have it takes up more RAM and you know just having dashboard run will dramatically slow on your computer under certain circumstances so if you really like dashboard you can click the plus button down in the corner here and maybe get rid of some of the widgets you don't use much you know I don't think I've ever done a Google search from dashboard I'll get rid of that and you know maybe I I don't really use the calculator in there either so I can just get rid of that but if you really never use dashboard at all and you want to get rid of it completely of course you can always bring it back but if you want to get rid of it you can actually disable it so that when you press the dashboard button or click on the dashboard application icon nothing will happen and it's not gone forever you can just type in a command and get it back but I'll show you what to do to disable dashboard completely so I'm going to go up into Spotlight and I'm going to search for terminal and open that up and in the terminal window I'm going to write a string of text and I'll have it spelled it at the bottom of the screen uh pretty big so you can read it and I'll also uh type it out here for you so it is defaults space write space com. apple. dasboard oops space MCX X Das disabled space minus Boolean space then all caps yes and you're going to hit enter and then you're going to type in kill all as one word space capital D OC K so kill all Doc hit enter again your Doc's going to disappear for a minute and then it's going to come back and dashboard will be disabled so if I quit terminal here and I press my dashboard button on the keyboard you can't see it but but nothing's happening I can go into my applications folder click on dashboard right here nothing happens So dashboard's Gone and what's not gone is your RAM and your processing power that's all given back to you because all those widgets are not running in the background uh tap taking up you know the valuable processing power you need to do actual work so those are five easy ways that you can really uh speed up your Mac and they may not seem like much but they really add up and I also think they're probably the most five overlooked um kind of most obvious but people never think of them kind of ways uh to speed up your Mac and they really do help out and I find them to be really helpful on my Mac so I hope you'll find them helpful too and I hope you found this video useful thank you for watching\n"