Optimising Your Mac - Part 2

Yesterday we started looking at how you can speed up your Mac simply and often for free - today we’re going to continue our guide to see what else we can do to make your Mac experience a lot more fun…

Older OS - If your Mac is old don’t try to keep it alive by stuffing new OS releases down its throat.  By doing this you won’t be getting the most out of your Mac, you’ll just be tiring it out faster.  Instead allow it to run on the OS it was built for and you should get a better computing experience.

Cut-Back - Although you might want all the shiny bells and whistles going on in the background on your Mac they can be a serious drain to your computer’s power and processing speed.  Try to turn off features like animated backgrounds and even dock magnification and you should notice an increase in speed and power.  You may be saying goodbye to the little OS X luxuries but you’ll be happier opening up Word because it won’t take 15 minutes.

Custom Install - If you are upgrading your OS then you should be thinking about doing a custom install and choose not to install the printers and language options as well as the X11 and Developer Tools options.  You don’t really need this stuff and if you’re looking to keep your Mac as powerful as possible then don’t bother with them.  Any drivers you would need for your printer can be downloaded from the manufacturer’s website or from the CD provided.

Languages - How many languages do you use on your Mac?  Unless you are a linguist that likes to show off then you are most likely only using one.  You can get rid of the rest and save yourself some space on your boot drive.  Download an application like Monolingual which goes through your system and gets rid of any language that you don’t want to keep.

Schedule Back-Ups - If you like to back-up your system often, which you should be doing at least once a week, then you should schedule your back up at a specific time that you can be sure you won’t be there for.  This way, when the back up starts up, you won’t be there to witness the loss in processor speed and you won’t have to get upset!

Duplicates - You should go through both iTunes and iPhoto looking for duplicates, and once found the duplicates should be deleted.  This is a great way to clear up some space on your system that will allow your computer to run smoothly once again.  Use the built in Find feature to help you as you can search through the libraries using many different criteria.

Speeding Up Your Mac?

Have you found our advice useful?  Have you successfully managed to speed up your older Mac?  Let us know what’s happened and if our advice has helped you out at all…