Proven ways to speed up your iMac or MacBook

The number one reason why readers seem to get contact us is for assistance in speeding up a sluggish Mac. Sometimes, Mac slowdown is caused by misbehaving apps, or even a problem with macOS itself, so over the following pages we’ll explore all of the proven methods of speeding up your Mac and banishing that spinning beach ball of death (caused when your computer hangs when trying to complete a process) for good.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty though, there are a few quick and easy things you can do that may have a profound effect on how your Mac performs. (1) Start off by restarting your Mac. Many of us keep them running for months on end and a quick restart will flush out old cache files and free up memory. (2) Update your software. Often, Apple fixes performance issues with a system update, so go to System Preferences>System Update to make sure you are running the latest version of macOS. (3) Swap your HDD for an SSD. Upgrading from an old-school mechanical hard disk to a fast SSD could make the rate at which your data and apps load, jump from around 100 MB/s to 3,500 MB/s – you may need expert advice on making this switch though. Right, let’s crack on with helping your lethargic Mac get back up to peak performance. Just follow the steps in our guide.

Before you start!

As the following guidelines involve potentially opening up your Mac and stuffing in more memory, or switching operations to an external drive, as well as numerous other tweaks to the settings, then we would advise you to back up your Mac first. If you have forgotten how, then here is a refresher course.

1 Mount the disk

You need an external hard drive that is bigger than the contents of your Macintosh HD. Connect it, then launch Disk Utility. Click on the drive and check it’s big enough.

2 Use Time Machine

Now go to System Preferences>Time Machine and click on the ‘Select Backup Disk’ option. Your external drive should be listed, so click on it and then choose ‘Use Disk’.

3 Auto backup

When the Time Machine disk has been selected, the ‘Back Up Automatically’ option will be ticked. Leave this on. Now wait for your Mac to back up, which may take a while.

4 Instant backup

If you enable the ‘Show Time Machine in menu bar’ option then you will get access to the ‘Back Up Now’ option straight from your menu bar, which can come in handy.

5 Exclude items

Speed up the process by clicking on ‘Options’ and then drag folders to the window or click the ‘+’ icon to add items to exclude, such as your Applications folder.