5/28/20
9:00 am

10 Ways To Speed Up a Slow Mac

Updated video for November 2022.
Here are 10 ways you can speed up a slow Mac. There's no reason to put up with your Mac being slow. Often this is caused by an app or background process using too many resources, the lack of free hard drive space, a failing drive, or many other reasons.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at what to do if your Mac is running slow.
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Let's say you have your Mac for several years and it's not running as fast as it used to. Sometimes it takes longer to launch apps, to accomplish basic tasks, things like that. What's going on and how to fix it. So the key to fixing it is to figure out why it's running slow and fix that problem. 
First I want to tell you what not to do. What you shouldn't do is install more apps to fix the problem. I say this because if you search for how to fix a slow Mac you're going to come up with all sorts of products that claim to do this. Cleaning apps, and maintenance apps, and things like that. You don't need any of those. As a matter of fact some of those will actually slow your Mac down more. Cause you more problems. So don't install anything new. You need to look for things to uninstall. You need to do some cleaning not adding more stuff to your Mac.
Okay, the most likely culprit for a slow Mac is if you have something running in the background that is using up processor power. So you want to figure out what's running on your Mac. The first thing you want to do is use Command Tab to bring up the Application Switcher. This will show you everything that you've got running. See if you don't recognize something there. Maybe this helps you remember that you've got something running that you don't need. Try to Quit as many apps as you can. A newer Mac should be able to handle tons of apps running. But if you have an older Mac and it's running slow it's worthwhile to Quit apps that you're not currently using. You don't have to quit absolutely every app. But if you see 27 different apps here maybe try to pare that down to about 10.
Also look in the Menu Bar at the top right. You see all these buttons here. These are apps that aren't necessarily going to show up in the Application Switcher. So, for instance here's DropBox, here's Adobe Cloud, here's the webcam control panel. Things like. Look for what you've got here and maybe quit things you don't actually need anymore. This is just another way just to remind you what you've got going on your Mac. The idea is to try to remove the things you don't need.
Also, in the Finder go to the Applications Folder and just take an inventory of what you have here. Maybe you can get rid of some apps that you don't need anymore. Then also in System Preferences go to Users & Groups. Then click on Login Items. This will show apps and helper tools that are going to run in the background. So if you see something here that you don't use anymore, go ahead and uninstall that. You can click here and actually remove it from here. But it's better to actually uninstall that app if you're really not using it. Don't worry about things that you don't recognize here. Some system functions and other things may show up. You can always Control click on something, Show In Finder, and then based on where it's located on the hard drive usually you can figure out what it belongs to.
Also you can take a look at Activity Monitor and when you run that make sure you look at CPU and you're sorted by CPU here so the highest CPU is at the top. Now you have to watch this for awhile because things are going to pop-up to the top when they use a bunch of CPU but only for a few seconds and then they'll disappear. Mostly use this to remind yourself what else you've got going on on your Mac. So look through this and see the different services and things that you have running here. A lot of times you won't be able to tell what different things are. They're just part of the system. Don't worry too much about those. Instead look for the things that have icons and think about, well, that's something I installed but maybe don't need it anymore. Maybe I should be uninstalling that app now to speed things up a bit.
So before I go to number two let's talk about a myth that a lot of people believe in which is that newer versions of macOS require more power. Now it's true that newer versions of macOS have new features and those new features may need more power. But it's not necessarily true that installing a new version of macOS is going to slow down your Mac. As a matter of fact, very often Apple includes optimizations in newer versions of macOS that will make your Mac run faster. If you can install that version of macOS on your Mac that means that Apple designed it with your Mac in mind. Even if it's six or eight years old. Which means it will take advantage of some of those optimizations. So don't be afraid to install new versions of macOS thinking that it might slow things down. Because that's not necessarily true. It may, in fact, speed things up.
Okay, so next look at your regular apps. You go to the Application Switcher here or if you look in the Dock below you should see the apps that you run the most often. Think about those and how you use those. They could be slowing things down too. Now  there might not be such you can do with it. If you need to use PhotoShop, for instance, and PhotoShop is slowing down your Mac you really don't have any choice. But there are some apps where you can use them in a better way. 
For instance, a lot of times I notice people using a web browser, whether it's Safari or Chrome, but particularly Chrome, will have a ton of tabs open. They just work normally that way with a lot of tabs. Having lots of tabs open will slow things down so you may want to close a bunch of them. Bookmark those sites and go back to them if you want but you don't necessarily need to have them open in a tab. So many times I hear people say my Mac's slow and I take a look and they have 40 tabs open in Chrome. In general Chrome is going to be much more of a CPU hog than using Safari. So if you like Chrome better than Safari but it's making your Mac run slow maybe give Safari a chance. You can have both browsers. You can go to Chrome for a particular webpage if you need to but maybe make Safari your regular browser for just regular browsing.
The next thing is Cloud services. Now as a Mac user you're probably using iCloud Drive. But maybe you're also using DropBox and Goggle Cloud and Microsoft's Cloud. Maybe even a few others. I see people that have 4, 5, 6 different cloud services syncing at the same time. This will slow things down. Each one of those has to examine the files in their drive, the files on the server and it has to sync between them. If you have a bunch of them running and competing for processor time and network time it's going to slow things down. So think about what Cloud services you're using and maybe limit yourself to one or two if you're using an older Mac.
Alright, let's talk about the Finder. Does your desktop look like this with tons of different icons on the screen. Each one of those has to be rendered. So it's going to look at say the image or text inside the file and render a little thumbnail.  If you've got 20, 50, 100 items on your desktop it's going to slow things down. That's why it's best not to use your desktop except for quick temporary storage. Don't put regular things in there. Organize them inside your documents folder. Clear your desktop out and that should speed things up.
But the same thing in the Finder. If you're using the Icon view in the Finder a lot it's going to have to generate a lot of these thumbnails. List View and Column View can often be faster but even here if you select a File you've got the little Preview to the right. These take time to generate especially if it's video. If it's a video file you've selected you have a little video player over here. So you can Hide the preview, like that, to turn that off and speed up the Finder. Also think about the number of Finder windows you have open. Sometimes I've seen people with 10, 20 different Finder windows like this open. There's really no reason to have more than one or two Finder windows open at the same time especially if you have an older Mac that's running slowly. Limit your Finder windows, use List or Column view, turn Previews off to speed things up for a little bit for an older Mac.
Okay, so here's another one. Are you shutting down your Mac or letting it sleep. I keep telling people they need to let their Mac sleep. Don't shut it down when you're not using it. Instead let it sleep so it can perform maintenance tasks in the background. A lot of people don't do this. They'll finish using the Mac and immediately shut it down and then start it up again and start using it again immediately. This doesn't allow maintenance tasks to happen in the background which means those maintenance tasks have to happen while you're using your Mac. So they're competing with you for processor time, hard drive access, and things like that. Try letting your Mac sleep. With a MacBook just close it. With a desktop machine either go to the Apple Menu and put it to sleep when you're done or just walk away and let it fall asleep on its own. Let it will perform its maintenance tasks overnight. That way you'll have things more optimized for you in the morning and these maintenance tasks won't be competing with you for processor time while you're using your Mac.
So here's another really big one. Hard Drive Space. How much hard drive space do you have free. You can tell pretty easily by going to the Apple menu and then About This Mac. Then go to Storage. It will give you this little graph here. So here's an example of something that's pretty bad. You can see I'm well above 90% used on this drive right now. You don't want to be this high and this may be why your Mac is running slow now. You may have been at 50% usage for a long time and now you're closer to 90 or 100% and this means there's not hard drive space available to speed up your Mac.
You see our Mac uses your hard drive for things like virtual memory and caches. Both of those things are ways that it speeds up your Mac. When you don't have the space it's not going to be able to use those tools for speed so your Mac's going to be slower. So all you need to do to fix this is to go through all your stuff. Go through your documents, archive things to an external drive, or get rid of the stuff you just don't need anymore. Go through your Applications. Delete applications you don't need anymore and clear space off. If you can't clear space off, there's just nothing you can get rid of, just make a note that the amount of hard drive space you've got now is not sufficient. So your next Mac should have a much, much larger hard drive.
So in addition to your hard drive being almost full, your hard drive could also be having issues. This is particularly true if you have an old spinning hard drive, not a solid state or flash drive that most modern Macs have. These drives get errors on them and the drive can kind of work around those errors but it slows things down. One way to fix this is by running disk utility and using First Aid. Now you don't want to just run disk utility normally. You want to restart your Mac by holding Command R to start Recovery Mode. That will allow you to run Disk Utility at a higher level so it could really go and look at all the things on your drive and fix any issues that occur. But of course this also could mean that your hard drive is actually really failing and it's time to get a new one or put that money towards a new Mac instead. Hard drives, particularly the old spinning kind, don't last forever.  
Now there are a few other things you should also try to see if it makes the speed of your Mac a little better. One is to reboot in Safe Mode. Rebooting in Safe Mode is a way to troubleshoot things on your Mac. But it also will run some checks when you do it. You can go to this page here and see how to reboot in safe mode. Basically it's Restart holding the Shift key down. Then it reboots in safe mode so it's not running any extensions and all sorts of other things and it does some special checks when you boot up. After it's all booted up you want to reboot again in normal mode to continue to use your Mac.
Another things you can do is do a system management controller reset. Now how you do this depends upon which Mac you've got. So go to this page at the Apple site and look at all the instructions for the particular Mac that you have. By the way you can do a NVRAM reset which resets some low level settings on your Mac. Go to this page there and try that as well. So those three things. Safe Mode, SMC, and NVRAM resets can sometimes work to fix problems and speed up your Mac. They're worth a try.
Alright so here's another things. It may not be your Mac at all. A lot of times when people complain to me that their Mac is running slow I ask them well, what are you doing that's running slow. They'll say, well, you know, the usual stuff, browsing the web. So in other words it's web surfing that's slow. For some people this is primarily what they use their Macs for, web surfing. So, of course, if web surfing is slow it seems like everything is slow because it is everything. 
So in this case it may not be your Mac. It may be your internet service. One of the things you can do is restart your router. You probably got a router or a modem from your cable company or your telephone company when you signed up for service with them. This box may have been sitting there and you may never have turned it off and on again or hit the reset button or anything like that. It may have been running for years. So it may be worthwhile to switch it off or unplug it. Plug it back in. Sometimes these things take like five minutes to reboot but after it reboots things are a lot quicker.
But it could also be that the device itself is outdated. Your telephone company or cable company is not going to call you up out of the blue and say hey we notice you have an old modem from us. Let's give you a new one. They're just going to let you sit with that old piece of equipment. Maybe one they haven't even distributed for years until you call them and say is this still current. Is there something newer you can send me. Then they would be happy to send you that very often at no cost to you. Other times your service itself may be out of date. You may still be using a plan that you signed up for five or ten years ago. They may have something that's a higher band width and even cheaper than what you have now. They're not going to volunteer this to you.They're going to keep charging you the same amount for the same level of service unless you ask for something better. Sometimes you pay less, sometimes you pay the same, and sometimes you pay a little bit more but for a lot more data. So it's worthwhile to call up your provider, talk with them, see if you have the most up to date thing. See what else they have to offer. Maybe you could significantly speed things up by improving your internet service at little or no cost.
Number 10 is a really big one. Say none of this stuff has worked. Your Mac is still slow. What I'm going to tell you is don't put up with it. Your Mac shouldn't be slow. You've got to figure out what the problem is and if none of these steps has helped you and you're out of options take it to Apple. Make an appointment at the Genius Bar. Go in. Show them your Mac. Tell them it's running slow and let them take a look at it. A lot of times an expert can look for just a minute at your Mac and immediately know what's wrong but it would have taken you a million years to figure that out. 
Now it may be bad news. It may be that the hard drive is failing. Maybe the apps you want to use just don't work very well on a much older Mac. But at least then you know you've tried everything. I often talk to people who have put up with a slow Mac for years before taking it to an expert like at the Genius Bar who fixes it in minutes and their Mac is like new again. So you have nothing to loose by giving the Genius Bar a try. If not maybe a local expert, or authorized repair shop can help you. 
So there are the ten things you can do to fix a slow Mac. If all of those fail it may actually be time for a new Mac. Remember we're asking our computers to do things now that ten years ago we would never have thought of. Editing 4K video for instance. Maintaining huge libraries of highly compressed photos. Go into complex websites that didn't exist back then. So sometimes an older Mac just isn't going to be able to handle the things that you want to do.

Comments: 25 Responses to “10 Ways To Speed Up a Slow Mac”

Colin Cox

4 years ago

What about the possibility that there is some malware using up your CPU?

Joyce

4 years ago

I agree the Genius Bar is a great resource. Have they re-opened and I missed it?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Joyce: A lot of the Apple Stores throughout the world have reopened in various ways. Check the page for your closest store to see.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Colin: I hope not! Do you suspect this is the case? If you have installed something from a site you shouldn't have trusted, then maybe.

Mike K

4 years ago

Question...
Will folders on the desktop slow things down too?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Mike: Not so much. The folder icon doesn't have to be rendered like image icons do. But it may be a good idea to put them in your Documents folder anyway if you have a lot of them.

Jennifer

4 years ago

I keep a lot on my desktop because they are easy to find. These are all things that I need to work on during the week. Photos, articles, folders etc. Where on my computer would be a better place to keep all my current things until it's time to put them in the appropriate folders.

Mike Saurin

4 years ago

Hi Gary
I agree with you there is a lot of ways to get your Mac to run faster, But I have a late 2012 desk top Mac and over time it started to get slower. Don’t have to many third party apps, Hard drive quarter capacity,and keeps the the system pretty clean.But I found doing all that it was still slow till I put in a SSD in now goes like a rocket It rejuvenate it 100 %.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Jennifer: For instance, put them in a folder in Documents and then put a shortcut to it in the Dock. See https://macmost.com/10-ways-to-quickly-access-your-most-important-folders-on-a-mac.html for more ideas.

Laraine

4 years ago

Thanks for all this, Gary. My 2-year-old iMac got suddenly slow—slow to start up, slow to open applications, etc. What worked for me was go to the go menu and choose go to folder. Then type in ~/Library/Caches to bring up the cache folder. Empty all the folders, but DON'T delete any folder. Weird. I have never had to do that before.

JOHN STIRES

4 years ago

Before taking your computer(s) to the Genius Bar, be sure to back it up first. I've made an appointment, discussed issues with them only to have to bring it home to back it up and take it back to Apple.

Hugh Vail

4 years ago

Can't you re-install the operating system which will keep everything you have and cleanout the out of date items?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Hugh: There's no point to that unless the operating system isn't working. Catalina keeps the OS on a protected volume. Re-installing just the OS would just re-write the same files. Anything truly out-of-date wouldn't be there in the first place or wouldn't be used.

Paul Reynolds

4 years ago

Gary,
I have an Applications folder in Applications folder. Shall I send the sub folder to trash? I’m afraid.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Paul: What's in it?

George Lud

4 years ago

You make no mention of "window server"? It uses 1.06 GB of my memory and various % of my CPU.....What's its function?.....and importance......

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

George: That's one of the primary pieces of macOS. It handles displaying windows for all apps.

Don Palmer

4 years ago

Gary: Great advice, especially as our 4-year-old Mac gets older. Thank you.

N Wemyss

4 years ago

I tried everything, aded RAM, cleaned up storage space on the main drive, eliminated startup apps etc, but editing with Final Cut Pro, especially 4K was deadly slow. So I bought a SSD 1TB drive, copied Final Cut from my iMac on to the drive and keep the active video files I'm editing on the SSD drive. So all the file sharing and processing is on the fast SSD drive and it's WAY faster. Best improvement I've done!

Michael S.

4 years ago

Thanks Gary! I've tried some of these but not all. I'm going to try the rest of them. Kernel_Task routinely runs at over 200% and sometimes over 900%! It sometimes runs extremely hot and other times, no heat at all. I may have to go to the genius bar. Thanks again.

Don Palmer

4 years ago

On Chrome, how delete an App?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Don: On Chrome? Chrome is a web browser. It is an app itself. You wouldn't delete an app "on Chrome." Are you trying to delete a browser extension? You do that by going to Preferences, then look for Extensions. Then each extension in Chrome has a Remove button.

Don Palmer

4 years ago

Thank you, Gary. It is an extension. You are my champion, and thanks for working on Saturday.

Paul Reynolds

4 years ago

Gary,
It looks to contain all of my applications.

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Paul: Not sure why your applications are inside a second Applications folder. But if your applications are in there, then you certainly shouldn't delete it.

Comments Closed.

10 Ways To Speed Up a Slow Mac

Comments: 25 Responses to “10 Ways To Speed Up a Slow Mac”

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