You might not think a 4KB text document could have much of an effect on your favorite apps’ performance, but tiny preference files can wreak havoc on your system, leading to spinning beach balls and untimely crashes. You can tromp through the Preferences folder yourself to find offending files or download PreferenceCleaner (donations accepted, www.echomist.co.uk/software/index.shtml) to keep your hands--er, prefs--clean.
Photoshop seems a likely culprit--and victim--of a slow-running system. PreferenceCleaner found all of Photoshop's pref files then gave us the option to delete them as a way to unclog Photoshop CS3's digital pores.
You won’t find the massive amounts of bloatware that Microsoft crams into Vista, but there might be a few unnecessary startup apps that are quietly dragging down your system. Go check out your Accounts pane (in System Preferences > Accounts) and sift through your login items for any unwanted guests.
We couldn't bring ourselves to remove TweetDeck from the Login Items list--though it probably would help us get more work done not to have TweetDeck auto-launch at startup.
Mac users have been hearing this since the days of System 7. Of course, OS X handles things a whole lot better--with none of those pesky monthly rebuilds--but if you’re in the habit of cluttering your Desktop with lots of photos, movies, and other files, it’s a good idea to organize them into folders every few weeks, especially if your view options (Command-J) are set to render icon previews.
Peripheral devices such as printers, multimedia controllers, and docks are nice to have on standby, but too many of them can cause a bottleneck that puts undue strain on your Mac’s system resources. Most USB accessories don’t need to be attached when not in use, so if your Mac is experiencing periodic slowdowns, try unplugging a few of these peripherals.
Just as a cluttered Desktop can slow things down, an overstuffed hard drive can hamper your Mac’s performance too. With an extensive library of music and movies, even 250GB can fill up fast, so keep an eye on your available space. When there’s less than 20 percent remaining, you might want to look into some external alternatives--or upgrade your Mac’s internal drive.
We upgraded an 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro’s built-in 150GB 5400rpm drive to a 320GB 7200rpm Western Digital Scorpio Black drive ($129.99, www.westerndigital.com) and achieved a performance increase of about 50 percent.
Activity Monitor can tell you how much of your Mac's hard drive you've crammed with stuff. Click Disk Usage.
Like repairing permissions, resetting PRAM (parameter RAM) and SMC (System Management Controller) isn’t a universal cure for everything that ails your Mac, but it’s good for fixing power issues, mouse lag, or other settings that may keep your Mac from running at its best. Zapping the PRAM is easy: Restart and hold down Command-Option-P-R before the chime. Resetting the SMC is a little trickier, but there’s an Apple support document that explains how: support.apple.com/kb/HT1411.
They’re not as frequent as OS updates, but every so often Apple releases a model-specific firmware update to tackle a specific hardware issue. These downloads don’t always appear in Software Update, so remember to check out the Support section of Apple’s website (www.apple.com/support) for the latest firmware updates.
The merits of defragmenting a Mac hard drive have been debated since the days of OS 8, but there’s one thing no one will disagree with: It can’t hurt to tighten things up. Coriolis Systems’ iDefrag ($29.95, www.coriolis-systems.com) may be a little pricey, but it’s head and shoulders above the rest.
Defragging your Mac's hard drive with an app like iDefrag is essentially what all the king's horses and all the king's men wished they could have done for Humpty Dumpty. You know, if they had Macs in Fairy Tale Land.
When Apple announced the switch from PowerPC to Intel processors, it did an admirable job of making sure all the older apps ran smoothly on Intel Macs thanks to Rosetta, a dynamic translator built in to OS X. But Rosetta apps are RAM hogs that gobble valuable system resources, especially processor-intense ones like Photoshop or Dreamweaver. If you can’t afford an upgrade to a Universal version of an app, skip to the next tip.
Whether you own a Mac mini, an iMac, or a MacBook, an excellent way to speed things up is to max out your RAM. More than likely you can double--or in some cases, quadruple--your system’s memory for around $100. For a performance chart showing the actual gains we achieved upgrading the RAM on an Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook and a Core 2 Duo iMac, see the end of this article.
OS X’s “Welcome” movie greets users in 15 languages, so you can only imagine how many useless fonts and localization files are littering your hard drive. Free space equals free speed, so get your hands on a copy of Monolingual (donations accepted, monolingual.sourceforge.net) and reclaim those lost gigabytes.
We'll give up our life goal to become fluent in Inuktitut, so our Mac can run faster.
Another bit of eye candy that might be holding back older Macs is the new 3D dock, but with a little Terminal tinkering, you can shatter its glassy look. Execute this Terminal command: defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES.
Now execute: killall Dock.
To return to 3D, follow the same steps above, but in the first command replace YES with NO.
While not as proven a speed booster or as easy to install as RAM, replacing your Mac’s hard drive may very well bring about snappier performance. For one, you’ll be adding more disk space, which affects RAM usage. For another, you’ll likely increase the revolutions per minute (rpm), which will help OS X retrieve data at a faster clip. And if you’re willing to spend a few extra bucks on a bigger hard drive buffer, you’ll really notice a difference.
When all else fails, a clean install of OS X is a surefire way to get your Mac back on track, albeit with a fair amount of elbow grease. “Erase and Install” after a backup is the best option for clearing out all the cobwebs, corrupt preference files, and stuck processes, but it’ll require more than a few restarts and trips to Software Update to get things up to speed, not to mention transferring files and digging up all those serial numbers and passwords. For lighter lifting, choose “Archive and Install,” but be wary of filling your drive with too many of those “Previous System” files and folders.
For older Macs, OS X’s slick effects can be a real drain on the CPU. Weaker processors will benefit from, say, removing the drop shadows in iPhoto, but Apple offers no way to lessen the burden of Leopard’s deep shadows. But if your Mac is really struggling (and downgrading to Tiger isn’t an option), Unsanity’s Shadowkiller (free, unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller) will wipe out every silhouette. Note: The result is not pretty. Nor is it officially supported for Leopard, so the only way to get the shadows back is to shut down and log back in again.
Next page: DIY Hardware Upgrades...
