When you buy a new Mac, you will enjoy its super speed which makes you think that buying a Mac is the best thing you ever did. Unfortunately, that feeling does not last forever. As time flies, the Mac starts to run slowly! But why does your Mac run slow? Why is it causing you these headaches and stress?
Why Is Your Mac Running Slow?
- The first reason that may be causing your Mac to run slowly is having so many running apps. Many apps running on your Mac take up much of your RAM and as we all know the less space your RAM has, the slower it is.
- Your TimeMachine backup may also cause your Mac to run slowly.
- FileVault encryption may also cause your Mac to run slowly. FileVault is a security feature that encrypts everything on your Mac. The FileVault is found in your applications folder.
- Apps opening at login is another reason that makes your Mac run slow. Too many of them opening at login will cause your Mac to run slowly.
- Background Cleaners. Having many of them will only cause your Mac to run slowly. Why cannot you only use one?
- If you are using far too many clouds it will cause your Mac to run slowly. You can use one or at most two. You can have OneDrive or Dropbox on your MacBook. Any of them will serve you well.
- The most obvious reason is that your Mac is running out of storage. When your Mac runs out of storage in the hard drive, it will get slower and slower. This is because there will be no room for your Mac to create the necessary temporary files.
- Having an old-style hard drive might also be the reason your Mac is running slow. You have used a Mac belonging to a friend and you have noticed that it has super speeds compared to yours and you might even be having more RAM that is unused. This day’s hard drives are much better compared to the old ones. You might consider replacing your hard drive with a solid-state hard drive instead of buying a new Mac.
- And the last reason why Mac is running slow is that your Mac might just be too old. I believe it’s logical that when things get old they tend to become slow. Having a too-old Mac might be the reason your Mac is running slow.
Those are most of the reasons why your Mac is running slow. If your Mac is running slow there a few things you can do to improve your Mac’s performance and speed up the speed of your Mac.
How to Speed up Your Mac
There are several tricks you can do to speed up your Mac. Most of these are free, or you can get rid of running slow with Mac Cleaner apps. Let us dive in and explore some of the ways.
Remove Unused Apps
The very first thing you should do is to uninstall unused apps on your Mac. Uninstalling and deleting apps is pretty easy. You just have to check your Applications folder and drag the unused app to the Trash. And then move to the Trash and empty them. Also, make sure to delete all the other associated files by deleting the service file folder located in the library.
Restart Your Mac
Most of the time causing the Mac running slow is that we don’t shut down our Mac or restart them. It is understandable, Macs are so powerful, stable, and more efficient than Windows computers, so it seems that you don’t have any reasons to restart them. But the fact is restarting your Mac speeds up your Mac. Restarting the Mac will close down the apps that you are not using and clear the cache files on Mac by itself.
Sort your Desktop and Finder
Keeping your Mac desktop tidy helps your Mac improve its performance. And customizing files that should show up whenever you open the finder. Finder is awesome, it helps you find anything that you want from your Mac. Whenever you open up a new finder window, all your files show up. If you have a lot of files, especially photos and videos it will slow down your Mac. Choosing the files you want to display any time you open the finder window will definitely speed up your Mac.
Close Browser Windows
Minimize the number of browsers that you are using on your Mac. If you don’t want to shut up any of your browsers, make sure to clear caches regularly, or that will take up much RAM and make your Mac slow.
Delete Browser Extensions
Sometimes browser add-ons help you block website ads, download online videos and do some research. But Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers, often get overloaded with various add-ons and extensions installed on them. In order to get rid of the poor performance on Mac, you should remove the browser extensions you don’t need.
Turn off Visual Effects
If you are using an older Mac but it is supporting the recent versions of Mac OS you might notice that it has become slow. This is because it is trying to cope with how beautifully animated OS 10 is. Disabling those animations will speed up your old MacBook Air or iMac.
Here’s how to speed up a Mac by turning off some visual effects:
Step 1. Click System Preferences > Dock.
Step 2. Untick the following boxes: Animate opening applications, Automatically hide and show the Dock.
Step 3. Click on Minimize windows using and select the Genie effect instead of the Scale effect.
Reindex Spotlight
After you update your macOS, Spotlight will be indexing in the next few hours. And your Mac runs slow during this time. If your Mac gets stuck in Spotlight indexing and keeps being slow, you should reindex Spotlight on Mac to fix it.
Reduce Your Dock Effect
Reducing transparency on your dock and finder can also speed up your Mac. To reduce transparency go to system and preferences, accessibility and check reduce transparency.
Reset SMC & PRAM
Restarting your system management controller will perform a lower-level rebuild of your Mac. The procedure for restarting your system controller is a bit different on different Macs. It always depends on whether your Mac has an inbuilt battery or a removable one. If you are using a MacBook Pro, for example, restarting your system management controller will only require you to unplug your Mac from the power source for 10 to 15 seconds. Plug the power source on and open your Mac, and your system management controller will have restarted.
Update Mac (macOS and Hardware)
Stay your Mac up to date. Make sure to install new updates as this will help speed up your Mac. New macOS updates are designed to help your Mac have better speeds and improve its performance better all around.
The last way you should try is to replace your hard drive if the tricks above are not working or your Mac is still running slow. If your Mac’s hard drive is not a solid-state hard drive, its speeds can’t match up with a Mac which has a solid-state hard drive. You should replace the hard drive with a solid state hard drive and enjoy the super speeds. Be sure to consult a professional before attempting this hardware change.
Conclusion
Mac speeds tend to go slow with time. This is because of the many files and programs we add to Mac that occupy too much storage. There are several other reasons that slow down your Mac but the most basic one is because of low storage space on your Mac. You can speed up your Mac’s performance by adding up your space and doing regular updates. And with the MacDeed Mac Cleaner app, you can easily clean junk files on your Mac, free up your Mac and keep your Mac healthy.