072511slow1.jpgHave you noticed that your Mac isn’t performing as well as it did when your first took that thing out of the package? You’ve treated it nicely its whole life and this is how it thanks you — freezing upon the most simple of tasks like opening a browser window or basic application. Turns out there are some simple solutions which have been proven to help Macs speed up and return them to their former glory.

072511slow2.jpgRepair Disk Permissions
The first and easiest way to attempt to speed up your system is by allowing your computer to check the disk permissions for every single file, folder, and application on your computer and repair ones that have been corrupted. These permissions often get muddled when users install new applications which have their own set of permissions which can overlap and confuse the machine, slowing it down. Simply open Disk Utility and select the hard drive partition you’d like to repair and click the “Repair Disk Permissions” This process has never taken longer than half an hour and has always worked to speed up our computer in the end. A third-party program we can recommend and is highly praised by the tech world is Onyx. This free application is a basic system maintenance manger which can help tidy up the loose ends around your machine helping it get into tip-top shape.

Check for Memory Hogging Activity
A slowing computer could be the victim of processes (either malicious or harmless in nature) which have been eating up a lot of precious memory resources. When someone’s computer begins to slow down, many think to simply restart it. This isn’t exactly fixing the problem. It may give temporary relief since it wipes all of those running processes but they will likely just repair over the course of your session. So we need to purge them. Open Activity Monitor from your Utilities folder and take a look at all the processes running. List the view from Real Mem usage in ascending order so you can see the worst culprits at the top. If something is hogging a lot of your space and you dont know what it is, we recommend Google searching the name and seeing what comes up. You may be able to simply cancel it or find a way to wipe whatever was initializing that process from the beginning.

Buy More Memory
Sadly, there is one solution that does involve spending more money. If your Activity Monitor reveals that the processes running on your computer are all ones you need to work and you can’t sacrifice closing any of them, you will have to buy some more. As with everything else computer-related, cutting costs for hardware is a bad idea. Spend the money up front so you know you’re getting a quality product that wont simply not work or worse, do damage to your existing system. We recommend going directly through Apple for their authorized memory and their helpful site browsing tool so you don’t accidentally purchase the wrong kind.

[Image: Flickr member cmbjn843 licensed for use under Creative Commons.]