TIPS THAT TAKE 10 MINUTES

13. Clear Off Your Desktop (KIC) - If you use the Desktop as an all-purpose dump like some of us do, you’ll start seeing the dreaded spinning beach ball a bit too often. Each of the folders, files, and icons residing directly on your Desktop eats up a bit of memory. Get everything off your Desktop that doesn’t need to be there.

This is what a clean Desktop looks like. Yeah, we hadn't seen one for a while either.

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14. Choose Speed Over Flashy Effects (KIC) - As fun as all the cute OS X gimmicks can be, if you’re experiencing a lot of performance lag, you may need to choose between speed and eye candy. If you favor speed, turn off features like system animations, zoom effects, and scrolling bars that gobble up system resources. The easiest way to do this is with Marcel Bresink’s TinkerTool (free), which lets you tweak hidden OS X settings to your heart’s content. And the latest release of TinkerTool, version 1.8, is compatible with Leopard.

TinkerTool lets you turn off OS X’s animations when speed is a priority.

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15. Hey, Ease Up on That Dock (Speed Demons) - If your Dock is filled to capacity, download Stunt Software’s Overflow ($14.95) to quickly launch programs and files without further stressing the Dock. In Overflow, you can organize your most-used apps and files into multiple categories.

Overflow handles the excess when your Dock is filled to capacity.

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16. Stop Annoying Websites (Safari) - Quite a few websites play annoying New Age music or flashing ads whenever they load (we’re not naming them here…lucky for them). Pretty soon we’re rooting around for a “pause” or “skip intro” button - a huge time waster. Safari Stand (donationware) lets you do things like turn off flashing ads and control which images, scripts, and other “features” load. Safari Stand can also stack open tabs in a vertical format, which is great if you like to open a lot of pages at once.

17. Surf With Keywords (Firefox) - Use keywords to speed up your browsing in Firefox. Go to Bookmarks > Organize Bookmarks, choose the five sites you visit most often, then for each, select Properties from the top bar (or Control-click to select from the contextual menu). Fill in a keyword of your choice - it can be as simple as the letter A for Amazon.com - in the keyword box. Now, just type the keyword into Firefox’s location bar and press Return to be whisked off to the website. Cool.

If you assign keywords to your favorite websites, you won’t even have to wait for Firefox’s autocomplete.

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