How can I fasten my old Mac OS X?

At a certain point we have asked this question to ourself and many times we haven't been able to answer it correctly. When I bought my first Mac Mini home I felt like sitting next to a home version of a super computer. It was that fast and advanced. But a year has gone by now and today I feel like sitting next to a sluggish OS X. So what happened to my Mini during a period of year? Out of 365 days if I was able to work on say 300 days then I would have 10000+ times performed read/write operations on hard drive, install & uninstall plenty of wanted & unwanted applications. I truly belive now my Mac hard drive needs an over-hauling and for that I am going to implement several tips and will also take the help of a tool if necessary.

Test Machine Specifications:

Mac Mini OS X 10.7.2 Lion
500GB Hard drive &

1) Starting with Mac Restarts: My Mac remains ON for almost the day and during the first half of the day I don't find any of the speed complications. But after I had my lunch and I make my way back to the machine I certainly feel sluggishness playing around the OS X which is very undesirable. To fix this time-being sluggishness the OS X needs to be restarted. So, close down all the application and restart the Mac for further work. You will definitely feel a good difference. The reason behind a restart is simple: because many of the already on applications consume lots of memory space and makes the OS X to respond even slower.

2) A Clean Desktop looks good: Not only a clean desktop gives a refreshing feeling but it also help the system get rid of sluggishness that is caused by plenty of desktops icons.

Image Source: Cult of Mac

The above image is what an example of a cluttered desktop of a Mac user. Hopefully you and me don't prefer to have a desktop like the above image. Literally, It require even less than 15 minutes to organize a desktop and manage the unnecessary icons.

3) In any OS X, you can set the login items in the System Preference menu. Doing that makes the system to start the set items once you login into your Mac. Other than the usefulness of startup items in System Preferences, the same can be the cause of OS X's poor speed. If anyhow, some unwanted items get added to the list then it will certainly consume more of the CPU usage which in turn slow down the system. We as a user never know, after a new software installation the items might add themselves to the login-itmes which now needs to be moderated on regular basis.

4) Are Widgets really a necessity: Installing newly launched widgets and applications are one of the famous activity done by many of us. Widgets entertain us a lot but the fact can't be denied that the same of them eats up good amount of computer memory resource in the background. Here, I do not meant to get rid of all the widgets you have ob your Mac but cutting down their numbers, removing unwanted widgets will definitely help the Mac have some more of the space that were early consumed.

5) Time Machine needs to be schedules: I have gone through several forums where users are dissatisfied with the slow time machine back up process. Here's how you can set the scheduling of a time machine back-up:http://osxdaily.com/2012/02/02/change-the-time-machine-backup- schedule/. This will help you to take backup during non-working hours and would not halt when you sit on your system.

6) Cleaning a hard drive: In OS X, many of the settings have to be changed to grab some more free space. Similarly, hard drive is a huge segment where we can regain Gb's of free space by performing the below following activities:

• Wiping out the pool of stored caches and temporary files from volumes,
• Removing useless applications from the hard drive which are not accessed for months and does not add too user's productivity.
• During a software installation, many of the languages get installed on the system and other than the default language all of the rest are unnecessary. Removing these unwanted packs of language files can make the OS X take full advantage of the free space.
• Duplicate files and data are a complete mess which needs to be removed at first glance. Not always, but many a times same file or software is saved on different logical partitions which is a burden on the hard drive. Here, the user can also choose a cleaning utility to dig out bunches of duplicate files from the Mac hard drive.
• With help of a speed up tool, the leftovers and trashes on the hard drive can be located for deletion.

Before I end this article, I would say that the above tips helped me get the crap cleared from my Mac Mini hard drive and have gained good amount of speed and performance back on Mac. There are plenty of more tips to implement which I would share in upcoming posts.