We all know that Macs offer fantastic performance and that the Mac OS is the most secure and efficient operating system out there, however there may come a time when you notice your Mac is running a little slowly, or not performing as well as it once did.
Let us take you through a few simple steps that can help improve performance and keep your Mac in tip top healthy condition.
Software Updates
Software updates are an essential part of the upkeep in maintaining a healthy Mac. They provide you with new features as well as under the hood fixes and bug repairs.
Software updates released by the App Store also come with release notes detailing what the update includes. It’s always worth having a quick read to see what is being improved.
Within system preferences, there is an option for “App Store” which allows your Mac to check for updates automatically in the background or download them automatically. This is a very useful feature as it saves you having to open the App Store all the time and manually check for the next update.
Perform Regular Maintenance
Maintenance is essential to making sure your Mac is running as smoothly as possible. One of your top priorities should be ensuring your data is regularly backed up, especially if your device uses a standard hard drive.
Hard drives are mechanical parts and will eventually wear out over time, but there are some simple steps to help minimise this process.
Solid State Drives are better as they use “flash storage” for saving and storing your data. However, they can still suffer from issues. Therefore, you will still need to make sure you maintain your Mac as best as you can.
By using the recovering partition on your OS, you can easily manage the maintenance of your device.
To boot to the recovery partition you will need to start your Mac and hold the option key on your keyboard until the machine boots to the startup manager.
Once booted, open “Disk Utility” (you can also open this from the utilities folder inside the application folder on your startup disc.)
On the left of the disk utility window, you will see your device’s internal disc. In this case, it’s called Macintosh HD. Underneath,“Macintosh HD” you will see all your different disc volumes, in this example I just have the one Macintosh HD.
With the internal disc selected, you will have two options ‘Verify Disk’ and ‘Repair Disk.’ It’s always best to run verify disk first to check for issues.
With the volume selected, you will see two options ‘Verify Disk Permissions’ and ‘Repair Disk Permissions.’ If you ever experience repeated errors by an application, it’s a safe bet that something is wrong with the disk permissions.
The bootable volume will not allow you to use the option ‘Repair Disk’ until you have run ‘Verify Disk’ to see if anything is wrong.
This maintenance is a simple task, taking short amount of time to implement. I would suggest doing this once a month just to ensure that everything is running smoothly.
Hardware
Hardware plays a large role in the performance of your Mac. The first thing to do when your Mac starts to run slowly is to check how much free space you have left on your startup disc.
To see how much space you have left, select the hard drive icon on the desktop, and tap your space bar to open the information window.
You will now see how much space is free on your disc. 20GB is the recommended amount to keep free, anything under that, and your Mac will start to slow.
RAM is another component that will affect the performance of your Mac, which will also be determined by the kind of tasks and applications you regularly use. For example, if you do a lot of video and image editing you will need more RAM than your average user!
I’m always asked if more RAM will improve the performance of a Mac. The simple answer is yes, if you have 4GB of RAM and upgrade to 8GB your Mac will have double the memory that can be allocated, resulting in smoother performance.
Each Mac Model has different restraints on its internal disc capacity and the amount of RAM available to that model. To discuss the options and upgrades available for your Mac, please contact our friendly Apple Technicians who will be able to advise you on the best option for you.
If you would like to book your Mac in for an upgrade or repair, please call us on 02008 660 9999 or log your Mac online here
Disclaimer:
While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. Amsys will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.