4 Easy ways to speed up a slow Mac

Your Mac can become slower and less reliable over time, especially if you're like me and mess with applications, kernel extensions and other things.

Before considering to upgrade your hardware, there are some quick hacks that can save you time, money and frustrations.

1. Restart it: A Mac is made to be always on (I shut it down very seldom), but sometimes applications might tend to become unresponsive and use too much RAM even after you close them (memory leak) and a reboot is just what it takes for your operating system to return to a normal state. You can monitor all this by having a look into Console (Applications/Utilities/Console). 
2. Slash Login Items:  System Preferences/Users & Groups/Login Items lists all programs automatically loaded at boot-up. To speed up your boot and recover RAM memory, you can disable any applications not necessary for OS X to work, by selecting them and clicking the "-" button below Login Options.
3. Disable the Dashboard: Widgets can come in handy, but they use a lot of RAM memory. If you use them seldom or don't use them at all, it can be a good idea to completely disable the Dashboard, by entering the following command into Terminal: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES && killall Finder (if you change your mind at a later time and want to enable the Dashboard back, you only have to enter the above-mentioned command by replacing "YES" with "NO" ).
4. Clean up your hard drive: This doesn't need to be done so frequently as for a Windows system, but can be anyway beneficial. I've already talked about Onyx, my first choice for this, in a previous post.
 

Wrap-up 

OS X can become slower and more sluggish over time, even though this isn't such a big deal as for Windows-based systems.

If you own an older Mac, you could consider to improve your system performance by replacing your hard drive with an SSD (Solid State Drive) or to add one to your system. For a reasonable price, you can have a super-fast Mac.