Has your Mac lost its zip? Do you wish you could squeeze extra life out of an older but still functional Mac rather than investing in the latest model? Or are you a power user looking to put together the ultimate high-end Mac configuration for work or play? Nearly every Mac's speed can be boosted considerably and inexpensively if you know what you're doing. In this practical, hands-on book, best-selling author Joe Kissell offers you the results of his extensive research and experimentation in the area of Macintosh performance.
This book shows you how to identify the exact causes of slowdowns and measure your Mac's speed before and after making changes so you know exactly what their effect was. You'll systematically root out the gremlins that chew up CPU cycles, RAM, and disk space; discover numerous tricks to improve responsiveness; and learn how to speed up your email, Web browser, network, peripherals, and more. You'll also explore the benefits of hardware upgrades such as SSDs, faster hard drives, and extra RAM; discover techniques and utilities to boost your Mac's speed; and get to the bottom of some of the most common and pervasive performance myths.
Get the Mac Fitness Trilogy! Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac is part of the Mac Fitness Trilogy, a trio of ebooks that help you keep your Mac in top condition by preventing problems, fixing problems, and improving performance. To read the entire trilogy, use the Bundle Discount at the left to buy this book with Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac and Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac.
Table of Contents
- Read Me First
- Introduction
- Speeding Up Your Mac Quick Start
- Learn What Makes a Mac Fast (or Slow)
- Try a Few Quick Fixes
- Diagnose Common Speed Problems
- Fix File and Directory Problems
- Lighten Your CPU Load
- Increase Your Free RAM
- Improve Your Disk Performance
- Speed Up Your Browser
- Speed Up Your Email
- Speed Up Your Network
- Speed Up Booting, Sleeping, and Waking
- Speed Up Mouse and Keyboard Input
- Upgrade Your Hardware
- Speed Up Your Peripherals
- About This Book
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Read Me First
Don’t settle for a sluggish Mac! This comprehensive book teaches you how to find the exact causes of slow performance and take steps to make your Mac snappy and responsive. This book was written by Joe Kissell, edited by Adam Engst, and published by TidBITS Publishing Inc.
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Introduction
Tell me if this sounds familiar. You get a new Mac, and your initial impression is “Wow! So fast!” Everything seems so snappy compared to that old computer you were using before. Without even thinking about it, you find yourself opening more applications and documents than you ever could, and it all just works. Everything you do—playing games, running Photoshop filters, searching your massive email archive—seems to happen almost instantly.
But as time passes, a funny thing happens. You begin to notice, every now and then, that something takes a bit longer than it used to. Gradually, those occasions become more frequent. Then you become aware of other strange behavior. Video that used to play smoothly now stutters. Web pages seem to take forever to load. Opening applications and saving files is oddly time-consuming. That cursed spinning wait cursor (see the sidebar The Spinning Pizza of Death) may rear its ugly head from time to time. And you dread the thought of having to restart your Mac, because it takes an unbearably long time.
This sort of thing happens to just about everyone, although the severity and the rate at which these slowdowns occur vary from one situation to the next. Likewise, it’s not at all uncommon for a Mac to encounter spontaneous or intermittent performance problems rather than a slow degradation of speed. So you’re not alone, but that may be cold comfort; your Mac is still too slow! What to do?
Of course Apple would like you to hand them lots of money for a new Mac—and sooner or later that will indeed turn out to be necessary. But take heart: you can reverse the effects of time and return your Mac to its formerly zippy self. (And, if you have a newer Mac that’s still pretty fast, you can squeeze even more power out of it!)
But here’s the problem. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of books, articles, blog posts, Web pages, and utilities that purport to speed up your Mac. I’ve spent countless hours researching these claims, and I’m sorry to say the vast majority of them are wrong. By “wrong” I mean incomplete at best, dangerous at worst, and nearly always based on guesses, anecdotes, or outdated information rather than, you know, verifiable facts.
Many of these claims have a bit of truth to them, so it’s easy for even very smart people to be misled. For example, a friend told me her Mac had become terribly slow, and she’d done some research that led her to believe she needed a larger hard drive. Her disk was within a hair’s breadth of being full, and it’s true that a full disk can make your Mac very slow. So without any further experimentation I agreed with her analysis. She bought a new hard drive—a big expense in her case—and I installed it for her. But a week later my friend told me with great frustration that her Mac didn’t feel any faster, even if her new disk did have plenty of breathing space. She was enormously disappointed, and although she didn’t want to impose on me by asking me to do further troubleshooting, I later learned that her next computer was a PC.
I bear much of the blame for her dashed expectations. I jumped to a conclusion, and I should have known better. We did indeed solve a problem by installing a larger disk, but that didn’t happen to be the major factor contributing to her Mac’s poor performance.
Maybe you’ve had a similar experience. Perhaps you tried something, or a dozen things, that should have worked—or that did indeed work for other people. But your Mac is still slow.
So let’s put all the conventional wisdom and guesswork behind us and turn to science. My aim in this book is to be systematic, factual, and testable. I explain the factors that affect a Mac’s speed and how they interact. I tell you what to check, and what steps you can take to solve various speed problems. But crucially, I also show you how to verify numerically if or how much a certain change speeds things up. You don’t have to take my word for it that some procedure may improve your performance—and you don’t have to rely on informal perceptions either. You can measure your Mac’s speed yourself, before and after making changes, and then you’ll know for sure whether it’s better. And if it’s not, you’ll have the tools and knowledge you need to try another technique, and another, until you’ve found and solved the problem.
I hope that little pep talk has inspired and encouraged you—you can and will make your Mac faster! At the same time, I want you to set your expectations correctly. You can make your Mac as fast as the day you bought it—and in many cases even push it well beyond that—without having to wipe your hard disk and start from scratch. But you’re not going to make a ten-year-old G4 run as fast as a brand-new Intel-based Mac.
In particular, I want to be sure you understand the following:
- The world changes. Even if you returned your Mac to its exact physical state at the time you purchased it, you may find that some things are slower because of factors outside your control—for example, a Web site that used to be text-based and speedy may have switched to Flash and gotten slower. You feel the effect on your Mac, but it’s not your Mac’s fault.
- You may have to accept trade-offs. Say your Mac shipped with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and you upgraded it repeatedly so that it now runs 10.7 Lion. Newer versions of Mac OS X (and of third-party applications) may add terrific features that you’ve come to depend on, but also require greater system resources to run, which may tax older hardware. So it could be that you must decide between speed and features—or make some other unpleasant choice.
- Returns diminish. You’ll do some easy things that speed up your Mac quite a bit, but as you progress through the book, you may find yourself spending more and more time for ever smaller speed gains. There comes a point at which it simply isn’t worth any more bother.
- It could cost you. Many of the techniques in this book can be performed for free, but if you want to make your Mac as fast as possible, you may need to invest in software, hardware, or both.
When I wrote the first edition of Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac, I treated slow performance as a minor problem and devoted a mere three pages to it. Similarly, although Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac overlaps a bit with what I discuss here, it focuses on preventing problems rather than curing them. The advice I give in those other books is useful, of course, but I realized after considerable feedback from readers that it didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the speed issue. So my hope is that the book you’re now reading will do far more than that—it should give you, by the time you’re done with it, a much faster Mac with a new lease on life.
Most of the advice I give here should work regardless of which version of Mac OS X you’re running, but it’s mainly geared toward users with 10.5 Leopard or later. Readers with earlier versions of Mac OS X may notice a few differences in behavior from what I describe here.
Speeding Up Your Mac Quick Start
Many factors can influence a Mac’s speed, including some that may not be obvious. So I encourage you to read and follow all the steps in this book. Although I’ve tried to present tasks in a logical progression for the most part, the order in which you do things is not critical. But please be sure to read Learn What Makes a Mac Fast (or Slow) first to get important background information; follow the steps in Try a Few Quick Fixes regardless of the problems you’re experiencing; and acquaint yourself with the test procedures in Diagnose Common Speed Problems, since I refer to them again and again in the remaining chapters.
Start on the right foot:
- Get a grip on the underlying issues; see Learn What Makes a Mac Fast (or Slow).
- Solve several common speed problems in minutes; see Try a Few Quick Fixes.
- Learn about test procedures, benchmarking, and monitoring resource usage; see Diagnose Common Speed Problems.
- Clean up gremlins on your disk that can have numerous cascading effects; see Fix File and Directory Problems.
Solve general speed problems:
- Make sure your CPU isn’t burdened with unnecessary tasks; see Lighten Your CPU Load.
- Prevent low-memory situations from slowing down your Mac; see Increase Your Free RAM.
- Get data onto and off of your disk faster and more efficiently; see Improve Your Disk Performance.
Speed up specific applications and activities:
- Surf faster; see Speed Up Your Browser.
- Avoid aggravating delays when using Mail, Entourage, or Outlook; see Speed Up Your Email.
- Test and optimize all the links between your Mac and an outside server; see Speed Up Your Network.
- Help your Mac get up and running faster; see Speed Up Booting, Sleeping, and Waking.
- Save time with utilities and tricks to increase input efficiency; see Speed Up Mouse and Keyboard Input.
Address hardware issues:
- Replace or add hardware components for increased performance; see Upgrade Your Hardware.
- Eliminate USB and FireWire bottlenecks; see Speed Up Your Peripherals.
Joe Kissell has written numerous books about the Macintosh, including many popular Take Control ebooks. He's also Senior Editor of TidBITS and a Senior Contributor to Macworld, and previously spent ten years in the Mac software industry.
