Transcription
How to speed up your Mac
Hey everyone. In today's video, I want to show you five different ways that you could try it right now to speed up your Mac. If your Mac is running slower, you feel like something's not quite right. I recommend you try these five things in the order that I'm going to show you and at the end of the video, I'm going to show you this app that takes a lot of the guesswork off your hands.
It's really automated way to do things and if you're not really a techie, or if some of the things I'm going to show you seem to advance, or you don't want to clear your cache manually, this app will take care of all of that for you. So again, pause before you do any of the things I'm going to show you.
If it seems too technical and then watches the end of the video for that app that will take care of it. Nice and safe for use from a big company, one of the best Mac apps out there, but I'm going to show you everything manually too, in this process. So let's jump on the iMac. I'm going to do this whole process on the iMac, but as I said, it doesn't matter what Mac you have.
It works on a ten-year-old iMac. The very first thing we need to do is we're going to open a free software that comes with every Mac call activity monitor. I'll press this search icon up here and type an activity monitor and just double click here to open it up and what this software does is shows you how much memory each application is taking up, which usually is the reason why your computer is running slow is either by running a very heavy application.
As you see here at Adobe, Premiere's taken up eight gigabytes of Ram, right? So I need to make sure I close some of these applications. If I really want to focus on just running one heavy application like this. So you want to check pretty much everything. Over 300 megabytes and I'm running quite a bit of software over 300 megabytes.
I don't want to run all at the same time. You could also check the CPU tap here and this is going to show you what is using your CPU, your computer's processor. So that will be another type of software you want to close. Right now I'm using pointer pro that's the highlighter on my mouse. So I don't want to close that in this case, but some of the things like I'm not using Chrome at this time, I could go ahead and close that or other applications that show up here.
So this just helps you get an understanding of what is taken up, the speed of your computer down here. You could also see cached files. This is a large size of cache files. I'm going to show you how to delete that too, to speed up your computer there. So once we figured this out, what do we need to do?
I'm going to close the activity monitor. I'm going to come up with the Apple logo and I'm going to go to force. Quit. To open up this window here. You could also get this window by pressing the command option and scape at the same time. That brings up this window and here we could actually close any one of the applications we're not using like Epson stylist, rhino.
We're not using it. So I could go ahead and force, quit that application, and another way to just quit applications. The standard way is to hold down, command, and press tab. Let me move this up right here and when you hold that command and press tab, you could jump into any one of these applications and close them that way.
As you can see, I got quite a few open here and he's slowing down my computer a little bit. So now that we forced quite a few applications, let's go ahead and clear our cash. Cash are temporary files that you could offload from your computer to free up some space and to improve speed now to clear cash.
There's a really easy way to do that. You could go up to go the go window up here, and we're going to do a search that goes to folder search, and we're going to type this in exactly. So with this symbol here, which is right above your tab, so you would press shift and then this key right here library slash Cassius and press go and it should bring you to the cash window here where you could go ahead and press command a, to select everything and drag them down to the garbage can. On your dock to get rid of them. Sometimes you may ask you for a password as well. So at this point, I will restart my computer and then I will go to the trash over here and then press empty to make sure these are all deleted.
If you don't feel comfortable, deleting things this way, I'll show you another way that actually takes some of this process off your hands in a second. Next, we're going to remove software that automatically starts when you start your Mac. So to see those, we're going to go up here to the Apple logo again, and we're going to go to system preferences and on this page, we are going to click on user and groups, and we're going to go to login items. Now, as you could see over here, all these items start, as soon as you start your computer and a lot of them are running without you realizing that they're running, you could actually see some of them in the menu bar and I have a lot running right now. So you could actually select one of these. They, you don't want running all the time. It's not going to remove the application. It's just going to make it not run. When you start your Mac and press the minus sign here and he will remove it and it won't launch when you log in with this username.
So do this to as many items as you see here day, you don't need upon starting your Mac. A very common reason why max runs slow is because of your hard drive, being nearly full. So to see that go up to the Apple logo here and press about this Mac and on this page, go to storage the storage tab here and take a look at this bar right here.
If this bar is near completion and is almost full, what you need to do is take all this information in here and put it on your external hard drive or buy one of these external hard drives and put it there to empty up some space. If you see this other folder, about 384 gigabytes on mine. If you see a folder like this, I'll put a link to another video that shows you actually how to empty this other folder, which a lot of max takes up a lot of space.
So if you have a hard drive, that's almost full, you could kind of go through these documents and see what's taken up most of the space, the other folder, or sometimes documents and applications could easily be removed from your Mac to empty some space to sometimes an external hard drive. I have a hundred gigabytes in the trash, so I should really empty the trash or if you see apps taking up more space than they should be taken up, offload some apps that you just never used. Maybe like I movie, if you never edited a video in your life and on the same window, you could go to the memory tab here and if you run very heavy applications like I do like Adobe Photoshop or Adobe premiere, I recommend you upgrade your Ram or your memory installed on your computer.
I have videos about that on the iMac, but you can pretty much buy it and install it yourself on any Mac and as you can see, I have a hundred 28 gigabytes because I never want my Mac to slow down because of not having enough memory. So you only have 16 in your case or 32. You may want to upgrade as long as your computer allows that upgrade.
If it's really old, sometimes computers are maxed out at eight or 16 gigabytes of Ram. So this may not be an option for everyone, and it's not the cheapest way to speed up your mail, but it's one that I recommend and I've done it to all my computers. I've maxed them out as much as I can and finally, I want to show you this software that I use, instead of doing all the things I showed you manually, I just run this software and I have a free trial of it in the description below this video if you want to try it out, but basically, all you do on this software is you just click smart scan and it scans your whole hard drive and it shows you what you could clean up. So in this case, it's going to clear up 37 gigs of space. For me, it does a protection scan for malware removal, and it does a speed test, which is what we care about in this case.
So let me click that. So in this case, it's going to free up Ram. Which I haven't shown you yet, because the only other way I know how to do this is through the terminal and he's very advanced and it requires code. And these other things flush DNS cache. Again, this is taken care of, for me running a maintenance script.
Again, I can do that manually. So if I go to this side over here and go to maintenance, you can see all these different things that I could check on. I'll just click on these and this is a newly installed version here that I have. So I actually haven't run this before on this, but I have paid for the paid upgrade.
The free version does have a limitation on how much you can remove. So I may not do that, but you could definitely start with that and if you feel like it's worth a do the upgrade. So in this case of the smart scan, I could just press run over here and he will take care of all these things for me and it's going to remove system junk, my mail attachment, and everything else that I don't want, and I just stopped at here just to show you some of the results that he gave me, but it's a really easy way to just take care of your Mac from the space perspective and speed perspective without doing all the manual things I showed you and I hope you could implement some of the features that I showed you throughout the video to speed up your Mac.
I hope you found this useful again, check out some of the resources that I mentioned below in this video, and I hope to catch you in the next video. Thanks so much for watching.