Ever since I started using my laptop as my primary computation device (5+ hours a day) I have found that it has needed an increased amount of attention. Before when I would just use it for light work or when traveling, OS X could keep itself nice and fast. But now that I am constantly installing and trashing multiple apps per week. It has needed some coaxing to keep speedy.

1.) Repair your permissions. You would be surprised how messed up they can get from a few simple app installs. Go to: Utilities>Disk Utilities>Select the drive your OS boots from and choose “Verify Permissions”. After the report has been run, if you see anything that says “Permissions differ on…” then you know a repair is in order.

2.) Clear your caches out. Cache can be a good thing. But if you don’t keep it updated it can slow down your performance instead of speeding it up.

3.) Monitor your start up items. If you have multiple apps all trying to launch when you start-up. It can really slow down your boot times. You can see whats que’d to launch at start-up by going to: System Preferences>Account>Login Items. Or, if the app that launches during start-up is in the dock, you can simply right click and deselect “Open at login”.

House keeping is another item that can keep your mac fast and happy. I suggest you go through your drive and throw out un-needed files and folders, especially if you have less then 20% free on your harddrive. If you go to “Activity Monitor” and take a look at virtual memory usage you will see why the more free space the better.