Macs are known for their fast processor. Installing and downloading any software, system updates, games, etc will slow down your Mac performance. It takes hours to diagnose and resolve problems, which is not an easy task. There are many reasons for your Mac running slower.
The Mac performs or run slow when it starts struggling with hard drive space and low processor’s idle resources. Some applications might get corrupted and slow down the processing, or if you have actively allow permissions to download any third-party applications in your Mac, you might have malware installed in your system.
Cleaning your hard drive is the best option to free up some space. It requires a good Mac cleaning software that will remove or cluttered all the unwanted space from Mac and enhance the speed of Mac. We have mentioned five common things that will impact the performance or slow down the speed of Mac. Have a look into it.
- Low/Little Disk Space
If your Mac is running very low on disk space, slow down completely, it means your Mac hard drive space is low. It’s simple, you will find many temporary cache files in your Mac operating system and they are taking more space in your hard disk. If your hard disk is full of cache and temporary files, it will take a lot of time to remove them because older cache files and temporary files must be deleted in order to generate new ones.
It’s easy to check your Mac hard drive space, simply click on the “Apple” logo> About This Mac>Storage. Now, at the bottom, you will find the overall disk space of your Mac and if available space of your hard drive is less than, you should take further action. If the Mac hard drive is showing space is 0, you need to take immediate action!
- Out Of/Insufficient RAM
There are several reasons when your Mac RAM is not available. This could lead to slow down all the applications or games that are installed in your Mac. If an application is running in background and there is no use of it(while working), it consumes more RAM and hamper the system performance.
You need to click on Finder>Applications>Utilities>Folder>Activity Monitor, click on the “System Memory” tab at the bottom and you will see a colorful pie chart. If you don’t see free space, it means you’re Mac hard disk is running low on “Free” memory.
- Falling/Corrupt Hard Drive
Failing/corrupt hard drives do not perform well, but it’s worse if you could lose all your important data and files by chance due to corrupt hard drive. This could be one of the reasons for Mac runs slow, but it’s also the worst possibility.
You might hear unusual sounds, clicks, or chunking coming from your Mac or hard drive. Running Disk Utility’s tool (First Aid) fails repeatedly or removes tons of errors that can’t be repaired with the “Verify” and “Repair Disk” functions.
- Spotlight Searching/Indexing Ratio
Spotlight Search is the in-built search engine in Mac OS, and anytime it indexes drive data it make your computer run slow. This process gets worse after rebooting between major file system changes when the index is rebuilt. All Mac machines with their SSD’s won’t slow down easily, but for all Mac models, they are still using spinning hard disk drives, which are very slow.
It’s easy to check if the Spotlight search is slowing down though by clicking on the Spotlight menu(Search bar) in the upper right corner, pull down the Spotlight menu bar to see an indexing/searching status bar, it’s running.
- Lot Of Applications Running In Background
Your Mac has a limited amount of system resources. It’s easy to check your available RAM and processing power with too many background processes or applications. However, you can use the Activity Monitor option to see which application or software is running at the moment. This is an easy process to check when you’re not sure why your Mac has slowed down.
You have to click on the CPU or Memory tab and check the first column to see what’s currently exhausting the most resources. Find and select the process and end it by clicking on the X button.
Every time you starts your Mac, these background process also started and to stop or kill them, open System Preferences > Users > Login Items. Select an application and click on the minus symbol to remove it from the list. The selected application will no longer startup when you turn your machine on.
Browser extensions and web apps also drains your available resources. It’s good to check your browsers for extensions that aren’t useful and disable them.
Above are the five things that will slow down your Mac performance. If you have any suggestions to speed up Mac, feel free to write in the comments section below.