5 Reasons For A Slow Mac
Are you contemplating to a buy a new mac? Before you take the big decision, try to understand the reasons why your mac has slowed down. Even a brand new mac after a few years will trouble you with similar performance issues. Hence, it is important to understand what is causing your mac to slow down? Once you know the cause, fixing the problem is quite simple.
Low RAM is one of the primary reasons why mac responds slowly to requests. An overloaded RAM pushes your applications to wait in queue to get access to your system resources. A list of applications along with their CPU and memory usage can be seen in the Activity Monitor. It is a utility that mac provides for users to monitor their applications. Some applications are inefficient in releasing system resources back to the processor after its use. Such bad apps lock the system resources preventing other processes from accessing them. You can find such apps in this utility by scanning the %CPU usage. Uninstall apps that are hogging system resources to free RAM.
Another reason for slow system performance is low disk space. Mac processor tries to use free disk space as virtual memory when it runs out of RAM to perform effortlessly. If you have a new Mac, chances are that your processor is really fast. Check this link to learn more about Mac processor benchmarks. Low disk space prevents the processor from allocating virtual memory. Use utilities to periodically check your hard disk for unused files. Software such as Clean My Mac uses efficient in-built programs to locate system files that occupy huge space.
A cluttered desktop could be one of the reasons why your mac is loading sluggishly during login. Remove loose files from your desktop and save them in folders. Rename your folders to personal, official, movies, music and presentations for easy access. Cleaning your desktop will help mac login faster than usual.
Check your startup items to see if there are any apps that are loading during login that you don’t require. Many software installers automatically load their apps during startup which can turn out to be an overhead for the mac processor. Many users won’t require all the apps to start during login. Users can improve the speed by removing unnecessary apps that get loaded during the startup process.
Finally, it is good to restart your mac once in a week to ensure system resources are released. Using your mac without shutting it down completely will lead to many apps using RAM or other system resources even after the apps have been exited. Restarting the mac can free locked up resources and also clear temporary files loaded in the memory.