Happy Healthy Mac: Fight the Slowdown

This month I’m willing to bet that your computer is under as much stress as you are, what with online holiday shopping, keeping your finances balanced, sending and receiving 60% more personal correspondence than is normal (or healthy!), printing out mailing labels for holiday cards, creating your iPhoto gift calendars, and all of that on top of the paces your normally put your computer through.

You may be noticing considerable slow-down, and it could well be that the spinning pinwheel of death is visiting itself upon you with more annoying frequency than Scrooge’s ghosts, despite your having followed last month’s Health tip.

Don’t worry overmuch.  There are some likely things to check that we didn’t address last month, and you may find one or more of these issues at play in your own computer.

1.  Widgets
We love them, they’re fun.  They’re useful.  They look great.  But you may be going a bit overboard.  Here’s how we find out.  Does this look familiar?

You laugh, but I’ve actually seen this more frequently than I would like to admit.  The truth is that while these little applications are light and slim, they’re still programs, and take up RAM and processor power while running.  Even when you leave Dashbaord (hide the widgets) they are still running in the background and using up your computer’s resources.  Resources which are needed elsewhere.

Bottom Line: Turn off Widgets you do not use regularly, and by regularly, I mean once a day.  To turn off any Widget, invoke Dashboard, either by clicking on the Dashboard icon in your Dock, or by pressing the Dashboard key on your keyboard, if applicable.  Click on the + icon at the bottom of the screen.  This will put your Widgets into Add/Remove mode, and a little X will appear next to each Widget.  Clicking on this X will turn the Widget off, and put it away until you’re ready to activate it again.

2.  The More the Merrier?  Not really.

How many programs are you running right now?  There are two fast and easy ways to find out.
First, bring your cursor over to your Dock.  There will be a dot or a carrot (depending on which version of OSX you’re running) next to your active applications to indicate that they are open, and taking up your computer’s resources.
Second, Hold down the Command key and Tab at the same time.  This will bring up a window showing you exactly what programs are running.

If you see something like this, save whatever you’re working on, quit all applications, and restart your Mac right now!

This is common among folks who have recently switched from Windows to Mac.  In the Windows world, when you want to close an application, you have only to click on the red X and you close the Application.

We have something similar in the Mac world too…

…but it serves a slightly different function.  In both cases, clicking on the red X, or the red circle (which also sports an X when you roll over it with your mouse) closes the window, but on the Mac, it merely closes the window.  It does not also quit the program.  See, Apple assumes that while you may not need the program’s window open, you might still want to have the program running in the background.  Therefore, when you want to quit an application, you need to go and QUIT it.  You can do this in several ways, the first of which is from your menu bar,

The next is to click and HOLD on the program’s icon in the Dock.  A contextual menu will result, and one of the options will be to Quit the program.

Another way is to select the Application, and use the Keyboard Shortcut, Command-Q.  [⌘Q]

Keep your Applications under control, and you’ll have enough RAM and processor speed to spare.

3.  Restart your computer at least once a day.  Restarting your computer reallocates your RAM.  It doesn’t matter much if you don’t understand what that means.  Just do it!  If you shut your computer down at night, and start it up in the morning, that’s the same thing.  Sleep doesn’t count, I’m talking about a full shut down and restart.  If your Mac starts acting funky throughout the day, a restart is the best medicine.  I can’t tell you how many calls I get every week from people experiencing performance issues.  The first thing I say is “have you restarted your computer.”  Doing so will fix the issue almost 50% of the time, and I feel bad sending you a bill for this sort of fix.  Of course feeling bad is never enough to prevent me from sending the bill anyway, so restart your computer prior to phoning for help!  This will save you time and money, and that’s great.

4.  Clean up that Desktop! This one is easy.  Do you have so many files and documents on your Desktop that you can no longer see your Desktop image?  If so, get them into a folder until you can properly organize them.  My clients will attest that I often leave a folder called “Clutter Buster” behind after I’ve worked on their computers.  I do not do this to make a not-so-subtle comment about your personal computer hygiene.

Why is this important?  Your Desktop is nothing but a folder, and the items on the Desktop reside in that Folder.  The difference is that the Desktop folder is constantly held open by the operating system, and the files are basically loaded into your RAM for fast access should you decide to open them.  This takes up your RAM and processor speed.

5.  Keep your Inbox Lite. If you have 347 messages in your Inbox, you’re taxing your Mail program.  Get those messages into Mailboxes.  (I’ll talk about taking control of Mail in February’s issue.)  I try to keep my Inbox to under 100 messages, which is a challenge, but it can be done if you get organized.

I have one client (and you know who you are!) who, despite my best efforts, has no less than 1,500 new messages in his Inbox at any given time.  And true to form, he consistently experiences Mail problems and overall computer slowdown all the time.  This is just how he uses email, he gets a lot of it, and it’s part of his business model, so we’ve figured out how to work with it, and not against it.

You may have a similar experience, and if so, it’s even more important that you observe the first 4 items on this list.  If you’re able to observe all of them, and you follow the steps outlined in last month’s Healthy Happy Mac article, you’ll be in great shape in between maintenance visits!

Thanks for reading, and have a great holiday!
See you next year.

~  Chris

 

Tagged as: Mac, Mac Slowdown, Spinning Beachball