How you find your RAM configuration – click on the top left Apple icon and select About this Mac Lastly if you have any free RAM slots – stick one in! Clean My Mac is a very popular app with a few extra crud and bloat busting utilitiesĪnother way to make your hard disk blazing fast is to swap it for an SSD (solid state drive) style disk, prices are down, you can get a 512GB one for less then $200.Grand Perspective is an oldie but a goodie and a free download.There are a couple of great applications to give you a birds eye view of data on your disk and help you decide which bits to nuke. I would say to leave at least 5% free of the disk space – ideally 10%. Normally it’s good to leave at least some wriggle room on the disk as Applications will use hard disk space as temporary storage especially video and image apps which are RAM intensive. Reclaim Disk Spaceįirst you need to know how much free space you have let on your disk, a quick way is to click your main hard drive on the desktop and then click ‘command’ + ‘i’ on the keyboard to bring up the info window, here you can see the total size and free space available.Īnother way is to launch Disk Utility from your Applications/Utilities folder and see the same info there. Go to System Preferences > User & Groups and the Login Items tab, authenticate, and remove any old or unneeded applications or ones your not even sure if you use, (you can always add them back later). Just run and let it do it’s thing, which basically optimises the disk, you need to do this in Recovery Mode so any issues can be repaired. When the machine is booted, run Disk Utility So how can you speed things up in OSX 10.11 El Capitan Optimise your Disk with Disk Utilityįirst up is to book off a couple of hours – boot your Mac into recovery mode by restarting and holding down ‘command’ + ‘r’.
The best way to upgrade is to do a clean installation and then migrate the user accounts and files over but this is a bit of an effort for most and a more difficult upgrade process – so instead we upgrade over the top of an existing set up, bringing across all the previous crud and baggage and thats what slows things down.
When upgrading your Mac to the latest OSX version 10.11 El Capitan you may find that the operating system is somewhat sluggish, you can speed things up and optimize the software and hardware with a few simple things.