Sometimes, especially if you’re doing “heavy duty” work on your Mac, you may notice it becoming a bit sluggish. There’s no reason to be alarmed. Unlike “that other” operating system, Macs are not susceptible to outside forces like spyware, adware, or viruses. I hear stories all the time from my friends and acquaintances afflicted with “that other” operating system that go something like this: “My PC slowed to a crawl and my friend-who-knows-a-lot-about-computers says it’s the constant behind-the-scenes work of my System Defender software that’s gumming up the works. He says we may have to clean the drive and start over”.

There are, however, times when your Mac may slow down a bit. Here’s some tips to keep you Mac chugging along at full speed.

Get more RAM. Mac OS X, and the applications that run on it, love RAM. They eat up RAM like it grows on trees. The more RAM you have, the more merrier your Mac. When your Mac runs out of “physical” RAM, it creates “virtual memory” on your hard drive. Since access speeds of hard drives are slower than RAM chips, your Mac slows down. I recommend one gigabyte of RAM minimum for Macs running OS X.

Actually, Mac OS X makes use of your hard drive memory pretty much all the time. Without getting too geeky, your Mac is constantly creating, manipulating, and deleting all kinds of files on your hard drive, behind the scenes, that you never see. It’s all in the name of speed and efficiency. If your hard drive is near full, the operating system has little space to manage these files, and things bog down.

Mac experts generally recommend having free space on your hard drive equal to ten percent of the drive’s capacity, to give Mac OS X space to “do its thing”. So, for an 80GB hard drive, that would be 8GB of free space. If you’re getting near full, within the ten percent “window”, you should move some data to an external storage medium of some kind (like CDs, DVDs, or hard drives).

Ever notice that, right after startup, your Mac kinda takes awhile to “get up to speed”? It’s not quite as fast as it was right before you Restarted it? That’s because it’s in the process of handling all the startup chores and creating these files that make it run fast and efficiently. Very shortly, though, you’ll be back at full throttle. Let’s forget about memory for awhile and move on.

One of the cool features of Mac OS X “Tiger” is its Dashboard, loaded with Widgets. Did you know that even when you have the Dashboard hidden, several of the Widgets are running all the time, using up processor cycles and memory? See which Widgets you aren’t really using (like the Ski Report here in a couple of weeks, hopefully) and disable them via the “Manage Widgets” Widget. It’s in the Widget dock, accessed by clicking the dot-with-a-plus-sign button when you bring Dashboard into view. Trust me.

Finally, if you’re lucky enough to be using a brand-spanking-new Intel Mac, make sure the applications you use are Universal Binary versions, rewritten to run natively on the Intel processor (if they’re available). Apple software is pretty much all Universal, but some major applications, like Quicken, have yet to be retooled. Although Tiger’s “Rosetta” PowerPC-on-the-fly emulation is very effective, if you’re using older versions of your applications they won’t run as fast on the Intel-based Macs. You can tell which version of the application you have in the application’s “Get Info” window in the Finder.

© 2007 Peter F. Zimowski