Ways to Optimize Your Mac’s Performance

The following pages cover a variety of topics on helping your Mac perform at its best.

Be sure to also see Optimizing Your Applications, and Optimizing Photoshop and related optimizing pages.

Install a clean system PERMALINK

A “clean” system is one without multiple gigabytes of crapware, demo-ware, Garage Band sounds, etc. This is discussed in detail in Setting Up Your Mac. You can install a clean system on another drive, and have Mac OS X pull over all your settings from the previous hard drive—it works great (always make a backup first).

Don’t waste your own time PERMALINK

Don’t get carried away—after all the goal is to save time, not waste it fidgeting with every little detail; you’ll never recoup the time you spend. Focus on the big picture, things that have clear benefits and/or minimal effort required.