Apple Mac PCs are highly popular with a wide range of users. Whether you’re a student, an artist or someone in the creative industries, or even an office worker who simply prefers the interface, Macs are brilliant tools for modern work. In a professional context, it is important to be able to look after your Mac in the right way; for example, many businesses opt for managed IT services to ensure their hardware is always being looked after, as is the case with TechQuarters, who have been providing businesses with IT support and managed services for many years now. But if you’re an individual with a Mac, there are plenty of things you can do yourself to help optimize your PC’s performance.
- Close Apps You’re Not Using
It’s very common for people to leave applications open even after they’re done using them, or perhaps open them in anticipation of needing to use them, and then not getting round to using them for a little while – meanwhile, those apps in the background continue to use up RAM, CPU power, and virtual memory; even if you aren’t doing anything in the app, and its just sitting there in the background, it will still use up resources just by remaining open. This all contributes to poorer performance. You can check your dock to see what apps are currently open; then, simply force quite the apps.
- Limit Apps On Start-up
In the same vein as the last point, sometimes apps are opened automatically when you turn on your Mac – these are known as startup items. If they open automatically, you might not notice that they are running in the background, and it can be frustrating to have to force quite the same apps every time you turn on your Mac. You can kill two birds with one stone by navigating to System Preferences, and then Users & Groups. There is a section called Login Items, which lists all the apps when startup automatically – by disabling these items, you can ensue you don’t have items running in the background, slowing down your PC.
- Uninstall Apps Your Never Use.
Everyone that has a PC has probably downloaded applications they have only used once, and then left to sit on their hard drive, taking up storage space on their computer. What is more, it isn’t just the apps themselves that take up space. Every application you install creates a cache of data that is stored in your hard drive – these can quickly amass into a significant amount of storage space being filled up. To remove the app and the caches requires a professional uninstall tool, and there are many of these available – both paid and for free. Users should regularly review their apps and perform a full uninstall on apps they don’t need.
- Use the Activity Monitor
Macs come installed with a range of useful tools for looking after performance. The Activity Monitor is one of these tools, and it is analogous with the Task Manager in Windows – it is designed to monitor the CPU usage, RAM requirements, and virtual memory usage of apps on your computer. This tool can help you see which apps are hogging memory of battery power, and it can even kill any processes that are using up a large amount of resources (however, be careful not to kill a critical process).
- Restart Your Mac Regularly
A lot of people are guilty of leaving their PC on all the time by leaving it in sleep mode when they’re not using it, rather than shutting it down properly. The outsource IT support London-based provider TechQuarters delivers always comes with the advice to restart your PC every day. This is because a restart gives your computer a fresh start and helps it run more efficiently. For example, restarting your PC means your RAM gets wiped clean, which means it will be better utilized when the PC restarts; and if there were any glitches or problems in software, restarting your PC gives that software the opportunity to boot up correctly again.
- Clear Up Your Hard Drive
Your hard drive is the primary storage for your operating system, and all the apps you have installed on your mac. The performance of your mac partially relies on the ability to retrieve information from the hard drive in an efficient way; but if your hard drive is very full, it becomes harder to locate and retrieve information quickly. Therefore, one of the easiest ways to improve performance on your mac is to simply clear up your hard drive. Deleting unused apps and clearing caches is a great way of clearing space on your hard drive, and there are useful tools that help removing fragmented data from your hard drive, deleting duplicated data, etc.
