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TICKET ARCHIVE -> How can I cut down on the eyecandy to make my mac run faster/improve performance
frozendice - Jan 17, 2006 - 11:03 pm
On Windows and especially XP there are tutorials for new mac owners about services to disable, and eyecandy to turn off to get an improved speed, but for mac I havn't found anything of the like. I have a 1.2ghz mac and it's running verrrry slow right now, I'm having trouble cleaning out old stuff, stoping things from running on startup, but my real problem is after I have all that fixed it still runs at a less than preferable speed. What can I do to get a performance upgrade? Can I disable shadows? Something else?
ishan - Jan 17, 2006 - 11:57 pm
1. Don't use haxies or other third party menubar addons or a lot of dashboard widgets.
2. Use Applejack (a free utility available from macupdate.com and versiontracker.com) and install and use it. It will clean out caches, check your preference files and a host of other things which help to speed up your Macintosh (after the second restart, the first restart will be slow, but that's normal).
3. If you've upgraded recently, you may have a lot of disk directory fragmentation (upwards of 30%). Use Diskwarrior to rebuild your directory. You should buy Diskwarrior anyway; it is a superb app for what it does and can repair drives that Disk First Aid cannot ...and vice versa
4. You don't say what kind of Macintosh you have and how much memory you have, but the more memory you give your Macintosh, the better. You can easily tell if you might need more memory by (temporarily, if you wish) installing a free menubar utility called Menumeters. If you click on the memory portion of the display from that utility and you see a lot of "pageouts" that means that the system is constantly swapping data in/out of the memory to your hard drive, and this will slow everything down.
5.There is no #5 I can think of right now, but it's late...
HTH.
2. Use Applejack (a free utility available from macupdate.com and versiontracker.com) and install and use it. It will clean out caches, check your preference files and a host of other things which help to speed up your Macintosh (after the second restart, the first restart will be slow, but that's normal).
3. If you've upgraded recently, you may have a lot of disk directory fragmentation (upwards of 30%). Use Diskwarrior to rebuild your directory. You should buy Diskwarrior anyway; it is a superb app for what it does and can repair drives that Disk First Aid cannot ...and vice versa
4. You don't say what kind of Macintosh you have and how much memory you have, but the more memory you give your Macintosh, the better. You can easily tell if you might need more memory by (temporarily, if you wish) installing a free menubar utility called Menumeters. If you click on the memory portion of the display from that utility and you see a lot of "pageouts" that means that the system is constantly swapping data in/out of the memory to your hard drive, and this will slow everything down.
5.There is no #5 I can think of right now, but it's late...
HTH.
frozendice - Jan 18, 2006 - 11:25 am
It said about 500,000 page outs under VM Memory.
ishan - Jan 18, 2006 - 11:40 am
No wonder your Macintosh feels slow–it is slow! Based on 500K pageouts, I would strongly recommend getting more memory. You either run a single program with large memory requirements or run many smaller programs. Either way, there's a lot of disk swapping the OS is having to do because of insufficient RAM. It really is a worthwhile investment. If you need any specifics, please reply and I'll be able to give you some more guidance, based on your system, apps you use, etc.
HTH.
HTH.
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