Every now and again your Mac may need a little bit of help from you to keep it moving just as fast as the day you bought it. Here are a couple of the most useful tips to get your Mac up to speed again.

• First and foremost, Don’t let your boot drive (the drive that stores the OS) get full. OS X in an OS the relies on, and utilizies, a lot of virtual memory. At any given time your mac may be using upwards of 10 Gigs of HD space for virtual memory. When the HD becomes full the is no longer any room for the virtual memory and thus performance suffers greatly.
• If you use Dashboard, make sure you only leave widgets you use often open as they tend to use up a fair amount of memory, even when not in use. If your not using Dashboard at all, it would be to your advantage to turn it off until you decide you need it again.  To turn off Dashboard, open Terminal and as root type: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES This will prevent Dashboard from launching on startup. However its still running. To finish turing Dashboard off type: Killall Dock in the Terminal.
• Repairing permissions can really work wonders on multitudes of problems. Go to Utilities>Disk Utility>Then select your Boot drive and choose “Repair Permissions”. Read the rest of this entry »