Similarly, to get a picture of what's taking up the most space on your hard drive, install the free Disk Inventory X utility. Also, I found that the sluggish iTunes isn't nearly the resource hog I thought it was. Perhaps it's time for me to abandon Firefox and use Chrome exclusively. After watching the Activity Monitor for a while this morning, I see that Firefox generally takes up more CPU resources and more than triple the memory resources. The numbers are constantly fluctuating, but they show you the amount of CPU and memory resources each app is using. If your Mac acts like it needs a nap every afternoon, when you are at the height of multitasking, there is an easy way to see which of your open applications is using the most system resources. Step 2: Identify and eradicate offending apps Uncheck the apps you don't need at startup. Go to System Preferences, then to Users & Groups and then click on the Login Items tab to see a list of the apps that open when you boot your Mac. Many applications by default open automatically at startup.

If your Mac is slow to boot up, the problem may be it simply has too many applications to open that it can't load the OS in a timely fashion. For Macs, it's easy: grab an external drive and run Time Machine. If your Mac struggles to keep pace from time to time, the following are some ways you can clean and speed it up.īefore you engage in any maintenance, it's always a good idea to back up your data. I see the spinning beach ball more than I care to. Sure, the amount of garbage I've put on it since purchase can't match the amount of crap I found in my attic and basement, but it is slowing down some. I wanted to continue our cleaning momentum so I turned to my MacBook Pro.

Now our attic isn't as overwhelming, and our basement is less creepy. We celebrated each run to the dump as we literally lightened our load. My wife and I recently cleaned out our attic and basement, throwing out and donating six years' worth of accumulated clutter.

Cleaning up my mac hard drive