6 Tips For Keeping Your Mac Efficient Fast And Clean
Macs are appreciated for being fast, efficient, safe, and beautifully designed. But even the newest Mac with the newest upgrade of macOS Catalina won’t keep its maximum speed if you don’t take care of it.
If your Mac is deeply cluttered and performing so slow that its’ fan becomes really loud, you might want to read more about how to get a Mac fan under control.
To help your Mac reach the best state of performance possible, today we want to share some tips. Here you will find a list of suggestions of what you can do to make your Mac perform better and faster.
1. Protect Your Mac With A Proper Antivirus
No matter what people say about how protected Mac computers are, it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
Make sure you use the best virus and malware software for your Mac. And by using, we mean that you need to actually use it from time to time – running a quick malware check won’t take up a lot of your time.
But it will ensure the safety of your Mac, your personal or professional data, and your files.
Even if it’s just a few folders with pictures from your travels, it’s still unpleasant to lose your memories without a possibility of recovery.
2. Always Backup Your Data
Even if you own a Mac, bad things happen to the best computers as well – they can crash, lose data, face hard drive issues, and experience many other technical problems.
To avoid losing your data, make sure you backup your data at least one in a week or two.
After you form a habit of doing so, it will become easier to remember and it will stand as a regular part of your routine.
You can use the Time Machine app to backup your files or simply invest in an external hard drive.
Another option is cloud storage like GoogleDrive, Dropbox, OneDrive, pCloud, and many others that you can find browsing the internet.
3. Check What Runs In The Background
There are quite a few things that can be running in your background. Check all the apps, utilities like printers, Bluetooth, home shared networks, cloud-based services, and tasks that run without you even knowing it.
Ask yourself, if you really need those apps or items running in the background. It is most likely that you will only need a half or even less than that.
So if you want to perform this action of shutting down the unnecessary items running in the background, all you need to do is go to the navigation bar that is located at the top and choose to close the unwanted items.
It is also very important to check the startup apps that start automatically each time you start up your Mac.
You can view these items, click on the main Apple icon, located in the top left corner, press System Preferences, then go to Users & Groups, and finally – click on the Login Items.
Now you can easily choose which items you want to remove from your startup.
4. Update Your Software
It is most likely that you get an alert when the newest software update is available. But if asked to tell the truth, how often do you postpone those updates? And that’s no surprise we postpone it – there’s not always time for it.
But at least try to remember to update your computer when you come back home and turn on the tv and there is plenty of time to install the newest updates.
This is important because mac OS is constantly updated to provide you with the best possible security and performance.
Also, many app updates come along with a new mac OS. Therefore if you only update one of them – the macOS or the apps, you won’t have the access to the best possible performance.
5. Remove Old Files That Are No Longer In Use
This is pretty common advice but let’s be honest – we struggle to find time for it and rarely come to actually accomplish this task.
But this is very crucial for the speed of your Mac, especially if you have chosen a slimmer model that has less hard drive space.
To ensure that your Mac runs smoothly at all times, make sure you get rid of old mp3, docs, images that have no use.
It is recommended to have a minimum of 10% of free disc space because after that your computer will start having some serious speed and performance issues.
6. Clean Your Desktop
It’s a simple fact – if your desktop is cluttered with files and apps, it will not perform as well as it could if your desktop was clean.
It takes no more than 5 minutes to sort all those files but it will have a great effect on Mac’s speed. This is because your Mac uses additional RAM resources to display each icon – no matter if it’s an app, a folder or an image.