Is your Mac running slow? Here’s how to speed it up
Wondering why your Mac is running so slow? In this article, we will explore some tips to make your Mac or MacBook run faster and improve its performance.
How to make a Mac run faster
Below we will run through the various checks you should make to find out why your Mac is running slow and speed it up. We’ll cover why you need to have around 10% of your Mac’s total storage free to keep it running well and how you can free up that space if needed. We’ll also look at how to find out if a particular app is gobbling up all the processing power and how to shut it. And we’ll look at other changes you can implement to your Mac to make it run faster.
Let’s start with three important quick tips to speed up your Mac:
- Restart your Mac regularly. If you haven’t restarted it for a while your RAM could be maxed out.
- Delete unnecessary files, apps and other items that are taking up space – especially if you have less than 10% of your Mac’s storage free.
- Update your software in case there is a software issue that is causing the problem.
Close unnecessary apps
It might sound obvious, but the best place to gain speed is to close any programs that are running even if they are sitting unused in the background. A quick way to see which apps are running is to glance at the Dock at the bottom of the screen. Programs that are running will have a dot underneath them. Alternatively, you can press Command + Tab to bring up the App Switcher and tab through to see which apps are open. To shut down these apps, Right-click (or Ctrl-click) on their icon in the Dock and choose Quit, or if you are using the App Switcher, select a program and press Command-Q to quit it.
Find out what’s slowing you down
Some apps are more power hungry than others, and sometimes they have issues that cause them to grab more than their fair share of your system resources. If you want to see which apps are using up your system resources, open the Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder, or press Command-space bar and start to type ‘activity’ and press enter to open it from there.
If you see that one app is gobbling up a lot of CPU power, then you can close it from there by selecting the app with the mouse and clicking on the x in the menu bar at the top of the Activity Monitor.
Free up storage space
If you want your Mac to run at its best and you don’t have at least 10 percent of your storage space available, you need to offload some of your larger files.
There are a few ways to find out how much space you have available. One way is to open the Apple menu by clicking on the Apple logo in the top left of your screen and then click on About This Mac. Choose Storage from the tabs and it will calculate how much of your storage is being used and show you what is using it.
In newer versions of macOS you can click on Manage to get options for optimizing your storage or storing photos and videos in your preferred cloud storage rather than on your Mac.
Make sure your software is up to date
How you update the software depends a bit on the version of macOS you are running. If you are running Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, or Monterey open System Preferences, click on Software Update and relax while your Mac checks for updates. If there is one to install, please do so.
If you are running an older version macOS, click on the Apple icon in the Menu bar and choose Software Update, if it’s there, or App Store > Updates otherwise.
Re-install macOS (Clean)
If all else fails, and you’ve tried everything we’ve suggested to speed up your Mac without success, there is one more option: a clean reinstallation of the OS.