6 tricks for a faster MacBook

What are the best ways to get your MacBook to run faster? You could always buy extra RAM, but that means spending a few extra bucks and can be a bit hazardous if you don’t know how to do it right. There are the obvious tricks of stopping important processes in your Activity Monitor, cleaning the trash and removing unnecessary applications, but those will probably not result in noticeable changes.

GeekMalaya came up with six much more effective ways of improving the performance of your MacBook. You can start out by cleaning up your desktop and placing files where they should be. The more files you have on your desktop, the more things your system has to index and create a thumbnail, wasting time at start up.

Just as we explained a few weeks back, you can also remove start up applications that you do not need. See what programs are opened when you launch your Mac and keep the ones that are only essential.

Disabling the Dashboard is also very effective, albeit obviously not something you want to do if you use widgets often. To disable it, open Terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Then reboot your MacBook or type in the following in your Terminal:

killall Dock

Another sensible thing to do is kill all the system preferences that you don’t use. It could be Bluetooth, Modem, Wifi or any other process that shows up in your menu bar.

If you have an Intel MacBook, reboot it and press CMD + Option + P + R until you hear the startup sound three times. This is known as”zapping the PRAM”.

For MacBook Pro and Air owners you can clear the Power Management Unit. Turn off your Mac, remove the power adapter and battery, press and hold the power button 5 seconds, release, then reconnect the power sources and restart your Mac. This will kill all ‘non-volatile’ RAM.

Another very effective trick that was not mentioned is to kill Spotlight, which can slow down your Mac with its continuous indexing of items. Check out our tip to know how to do this.

Try out a few of these tricks, or better still all of them, and you should see a notable increase in the speed of your MacBook.