The Essential Guide For Mac
20 March 2018 Macs don’t ever slow down, don’t ever crash, and sure as rain don’t ever run out of space. Unfortunately, Macs might be the sports cars of the IT business, but just like any car, they need proper maintenance to keep running. In this guide we’ll walk you through the essentials — and even some great secrets — to clean up invisible clutter and tune up your MacBook, iMac, or Mac Pro beyond its limits. If your Mac is running slow, you might be looking at a lot of different symptoms such as applications taking ages to start or your browser feeling sluggish despite a fast internet connection. Other times you’ll hear the fans ramping up to levels that would put your vacuum to shame.
Worst case scenario, your Mac slows down to a crawl until it freezes. Why is my Mac running so slow? A slow Mac can be caused by a lot of different factors, including:., which are all screaming for your Mac’s attention. In this guide, we’ll go through the most common causes of slowdowns and help you fix them. Technical background The internals of a Mac are almost identical to modern PCs.
And macOS is bound by the same rules that plague Windows: as you install more and more programs or reach the limits of your disk space, you’ll experience drastic slowdowns in your day to day work. In our tests, that slowdown can be even worse than on equivalent Windows machines. Let’s have a look a look at what happens when we fill up the disk space on a 2016 15” MacBook Pro with touch bar, 2.6 GHz Core i7, 16 GB RAM, AMD Radeon 460 PRO, and a 512 GB SSD. Smart voip for mac.
Startup time of a Mac with full disk space (lower is better) 50 GB available disk space: 11 seconds 250 MB available disk space: 39 seconds Launching Outlook 2016 for Mac (lower is better) 50 GB available disk space: 3 seconds 250 MB available disk space: 8 seconds Converting a 200 MB 4K video file (lower is better) 50 GB available disk space: 9 seconds 250 MB available disk space: 32 seconds These results partially show how even the fastest machines are bogged down by low disk space. Every click came with a delay or an error message, which is mostly caused by the virtual memory system of macOS and not enough space in the temporary caches of your applications. Without that space, applications won’t work as expected, resulting in either crashes or slowdowns. But it’s also the additional app or program that runs automatically at startup or in the background that slows things down quite a bit, even on modern Macs. At any rate, if you’re reading this, chances are your Mac is in some form of peril.
This is why we’re here. We’ll start by showing you the essential tips to cleaning up a Mac before we delve into some tips to improve speeds and battery life. The Basics Get those updates going To optimize and boost your Mac’s performance, first things first: make sure that your macOS is up to date. Apple always finds a way to improve performance or to get rid of bottlenecks that plague your Mac. Either way, unless your Mac is hopelessly outdated or not supported anymore, the latest macOS updates tend to make things run smoother.
To check for updates, open the Mac App Store and click on the Updates category. Install updates for everything that you see listed there. Remove applications you’ve long abandoned Just like PCs, the more programs you install, the more you have going on in the background. Free yourself from this clutter by going through your list of applications and carefully deciding which ones you need and which ones you don’t. You’ll find the list by going to your desktop menu bar, clicking on Go and selecting Applications.
To uninstall an app you can either drag it to the Recycle Bin or right-click and select Move to Trash. This isn’t perfect, though.
Uninstalling apps typically leaves behind some cache files, settings, or other temporary data which (spoiler alert) you will learn to remove with one of our own tools. Get some basic disk maintenance going Every so often your disk needs a regular health check to prevent errors and data loss.
If some problems are found, it can instantly fix them. But if it can’t, it is usually a sign that your hard disk is about to give up, which means one thing: backup time! To perform a scan, click on Go in the menu bar and head over to Utilities. From here, click on Disk Utility.
The Essential Guide For Mac Download
Select your main hard disk and click on First Aid. Next, you’ll see a summary of issues found.
If you see an error, it’s time to launch a repair: In the example, macOS found corruptions in the file system, which can only be repaired by going into your Mac’s recovery environment and launching First Aid (holding down the Command key + R gets you into recovery mode). Reset SMC & PRAM once in awhile SMC? Sounds scary, but it isn’t. All Macs have a System Management Controller (SMC).
This is a chip inside your Mac that controls its ports, fans, power button, Wi-Fi, power management, and many other physical parts. By using your Mac and lots of accessories, the SMC could become corrupt. Meanwhile, the Parameter Random Access Memory (or PRAM) is a small memory chip which contains basic system settings like trackpad sensitivity, date and time, volume, and keyboard backlight. Over time and through many updates, this too can become buggy. If you’re experiencing strange problems like blank displays, Wi-Fi issues, fans running at full speed, random shutdowns, slowdowns, USB ports not working, and more (the list goes on), then resetting the SMC and PRAM might work well. How to reset the SMC Reset SMC: For MacBooks with a non-removable battery To reset the SMC, you have to shutdown your Mac completely. Now, while it’s off, hold down SHIFT + CONTROL + OPTION on your keyboards (left side), and press the power button.
Hold all those keys for 10 seconds (and try not to get a cramp). Release the keys and power on your Mac normally. Reset SMC: For a MacBook with a removable battery Shutdown your MacBook, remove the power cord, remove the battery, and hold the power button for at leaast 5 seconds. Then put the battery back, plug your MacBook in, and turn it on. Reset SMC: For your Mac desktop Shutdown your Mac, remove the power cord, wait for 15-20 seconds, plug it back in, and turn it on. Couldn’t be easier. How to reset the PRAM To reset the PRAM (this applies to all machines), you need to shutdown your Mac and press the power button.
Immediately push COMMAND, OPTION, P and R at the same time. Keep these keys pushed until your Mac reboots — then release. That should fix many strange Mac issues that you couldn’t solve otherwise. Cleaning up your Mac, top to bottom Check what’s really occupying your disk Say you forget all the files you have, and you want to know what’s occupying so many gigabytes of disk space. There’s an easy way to find out. First, click the Mac icon in the top left corner, then click Storage.
Wait a bit until the calculation is complete: In the example, you can see that a massive Photos library, possibly residing in a subfolder that’s been buried, amounts to almost 17 GB. For a more detailed glimpse, go to Manage. Start with the Recommendations category at the top of the list: Following the advice will help remove iTunes movies and TV shows you’ve watched, empty the trash and sort through files (which takes you to the file manager mentioned above). Under the first category, Applications, you can see which apps take up the most space (and delete them right away if you don’t need them).
Under Documents, you have an easy view of large files, downloads, and access to the file browser. The latter shows huge folders and allows you to see what’s hidden where. Next, you can turn your attention to other files like iBooks to delete books you’ve read or audio books you’ve already listened to. Oftentimes, iTunes will store massive iPhone backups, which you can delete as they usually take up many gigabytes of space.
(But only delete older ones that you’re sure you won’t need!) You’ll find those under iOS files. Another biggie might be Messages: if you use the app iMessage on your Mac, it stores ALL movies, photos, and even files like PDFs in a hidden folder. In the case below, it grew to 1.27 GB.
(And, for real, it took less than 4 weeks!) If you (like us) are not the most talented musicians, you might want to delete the GarageBand sound library under Music Creation, which can free up 2.3 GB on macOS High Sierra. Last but not least, turn on the iCloud Photo Library which moves your local library to the cloud, saving you another few GBs. Note, though, this only makes real sense for iCloud users. How to clean cache files on MacOS You can also do some basic cleaning of application caches, which are files that apps keep around long after they need them. To do this, open Finder and click on Go To Folder in the Go menu.
Enter the following: /Library/Caches Now, open up each and every individual folder and empty the content. Do not delete the folders themselves, as this might result in some issues with your apps. Unfortunately, you have to do this on a regular basis, and this cache is only one area where macOS and your apps store their temporary files.
It’s why we built which scans your Mac top-to-bottom for these files and gets rid of them automatically for you — across your entire hard disk. Our cleanup application gets rid of all the junk you don’t need on your MacBook, Mac, or iMac.
Examples of things we clean up:. Apple help: Temporary caches from Apple’s help files. Safari user cache: Temporary browsing files from Safari. Location services: Temporarily stored files from the location services of macOS. Spotify: Leftover data from the Spotify app.
Photos: Wasteful cache files from the Photos app. Log files: These files are generated on a regular basis by macOS and installed programs when you’re encountering a problem or just to protocol normal operation. For example, macOS logs every crash under /Library/Logs/DiagnosticsReport, which can grow to hundreds of megabytes in size. But when programs crash, the relevant information will be stored in a folder called CrashReporter. These files contain information about your PC, some user information, and, in some cases, a huge amount of data on the crash itself.
Unless you’re a developer, this information is useless and can be safely deleted using Avast Cleanup Pro. Trash: The recycle bin of macOS. As many users forget to delete this, our cleanup tool provides a safe way to clear it out in one go. Downloads: As the default location for users’ downloads, this can include long-forgotten and sometimes massive amounts of data the user doesn’t need anymore. Development junk: Programmers will appreciate the fact that Avast Cleanup Pro removes temporary leftover files, such as XCode temp files.
External hard disk junk: MacOS also stores temporary files on external disks once they’re connected. We remove these so none of your USB drives are being cluttered with files you don’t need. Duplicate files: Every once in a while, users or programs accidentally copy (duplicate) files.
This can happen if you download multiple copies of the same file, duplicate photos or videos to edit and forget about them, or accidentally backup files more than once, just to name a few scenarios. You will be surprised by how many duplicates can be found on even the tidiest Mac.
Users that change platforms are there every day. It can be from iOS to Android, from Mac to Windows or Linux and of course, vice versa, users who start using Apple products. If you are one of those who will make the jump, you know someone or just take a short time since you left behind Windows to use macOS X here we discuss everything you should know. To begin, you must know that Apple offers a lot of information on its Still, next we will see some aspects that I hope will be useful. If you are knowledgeable users you can go jumping to other points, you still find something useful. And if not, you can propose any topic and I will discuss them in future articles. From Windows to MacOS X: the Finder. The first option is Command + Alt + Esc and a window will be opened to force the closing of applications or the own restart of Finder.
The second option, on the Dock, we right click on the icon keeping the Altitude key pressed. We will see the option of Restart. Finally, through Terminal we can execute the code KillAll Finder Next to the Finder it is important to know the structure of the macOS desktop. In the upper part you will see the application bar, which will always correspond to the active application (selected at that moment). This app can be Finder or any other one that you have open. And in this bar the different menus will appear. Finally, there we also find or we can find the Spotlight icon (magnifying glass) and the Siri icon. The first launches the search engine integrated into the system, one of the features that I value most in macOS. The second allows launch the Apple assistant that came not long ago to the Mac after seeing the light on iOS devices. Then we have the desktop itself, space where the sales of the various apps appear and that we can manage through Mission Control, creating more virtual desktops, etc. And finally we see the Dock, where we can have quick access to applications, folders, units, etc. All those things that you access frequently.
System preferences. Knowing the preferences of the system is something vital. Every user of a Mac should know what options each of its sections offer to control their equipment. Even so, the basic ones that you must know yes or yes are:. Security and Privacy, especially your General and Privacy options. From them we can establish what apps we allow to install and use as well as the privacy settings that, for example, will allow an app to access our address book or accessibility options to modify or control certain aspects of the system. Something that you can complement with these tips to make your Mac safer.
Network, another of the key sections. It will allow us to configure the configuration of the various adapters to connect to the Internet available. That way we can establish a fixed IP, create locations, etc. Mission Control, essential to work more comfortable. Especially for the configuration of active corners.
iCloud to manage our account and the services we want to use (notes, contacts, reminders, keychain, ). Again in the support pages of Apple you can find useful information about And as an extra bonus some applications that help the rapid positioning of the same through keyboard shortcuts, etc. Swiss Arrows. All this together with and the use of multiple keyboard shortcuts will make your productivity and comfort when using the operating system increase. Some combinations are simple, for others you have to know the system a little more. But do not forget that we can modify and create our own keyboard shortcuts. Test key combinations, drag & drop and many other things are key to discover the great secrets of macOS X. The drag-and-drop feature helps a lot in your daily work when you want to take a file or information between applications. Also, use modifiers such as the ALT key. With it you can achieve the same copy and paste behavior of Windows. But do not just stay with that key (modifier) others like the command key when releasing a file to another unit causes us to move it and not duplicate it (default behavior in macOS X).
Applications for Mac. When we are used to a platform the main problem when changing is to find applications equal or equivalent to those we used before. But first I want to explain how the macOS apps are.
In Mac we can say that there are two different types of apps: those that need installation and those that are containers. The first as you can guess make use of an installer to place files in various folders of the system necessary for proper operation. The second does not, simply drag and drop on the application folder the file that is normally contained in a.DMG or.ZIP file. Therefore, when you open one of these files you will see that a kind of new unit is mounted. Well, inside is the app, drag it to the desktop or application folder. Then you can eject that image through the combination Command + E, with the Eject unit menu or by dragging and dropping over the trash that will change icon. Why is it important to know this? Well, because when it comes to eliminating them, it will be important to do it well if we do not want to have “garbage” in the system. If it is an application type the Adobe Suite you will have to use its uninstaller. Here it is advisable to pay attention or in case of doubt go to the developer’s website.
If on the contrary they are container applications it is enough to transfer them to the wastebasket. The few files that will remain on the computer are of preferences and do not affect. Even so, the correct and recommended way is to use applications like AppZapper, Appcleaner or CleanMyMac. The latter is very useful for many other reasons and one of my few recommendations for all types of users. Where do I find applications for the Mac. The Mac App Store is the safest way to get apps for the Mac but not the only one, do not confuse some “enlightened” If you think or need to install applications downloaded by other means I would recommend you be sure that its origin is legit. It would not be the first or last time that a user installs a downloaded application and this, instead of installing the application, what it does is run a script or malware. But we talk about security a bit later. The other thing that you need to know to install downloaded applications is that you will have to give permission if the system identifies that it comes from an unidentified site or developer. For this you go to System Preferences and in Security and Privacy click Open. If you are only going to use apps from the App Store, do not check the App Store option and identified developers. Security on the Mac. MacOS is a very secure system but it is not perfect, knowing how to protect yourself and solve errors is key As a UNIX system, macOS has the advantage that applications must be previously authorized to run and make changes. If you miss a message asking you to enter the security / administrator password and you have doubts, do not do it. Look in forums or consult with an advanced user so they can guide you. That is the first step to enjoy the security of the Mac.
The second is that you will not need antivirus as such. HUID of any notice or publicity about MacKeeper. Run away from MacKeeper, do not install it That mentality inherited from Windows here does not make sense. However, there are situations where it is recommended. But not for your own need but for the safety of third parties. If you are in a network with PC Windows computers a malicious file will not affect you but you could serve as a propagation channel. And of course, if a person receives a file from you, the last thing they will think is that they may come infected. So pay attention. But as I said, the use of antivirus in macOS is not necessary in 90% of cases. And where it usually is, there are other measures to control work environments.
MacOS X: do I need drivers for my devices? Windows users have very assumed the need to install drivers so that the devices they install work optimally. At least until not long ago.
In modern operating systems, such as the latest versions of Windows and for a long time on the Mac, there is a base of universal controllers that allow numerous devices such as cameras, printers, etc. To work correctly. When you connect a new USB device to your Mac only rarely, you will have to perform an installation. Moreover, on these occasions the system usually launches an assistant to download the necessary driver. So do not worry. Unless it’s something very specific, for an accessory to work on your Mac you just have to connect and go. Time Machine, save your data.
Time Machine, that utility of macOS X that is only valued when we resort to it or we can not do it because we do not use it To use Time Machine you only need an additional storage unit. It can be an external USB hard drive or even network drives. This last option to use network drives is not the easiest to configure but following the everyone should be able to do so. If you want to enjoy this option, as well as many others, I would recommend you to do with a Syonology NAS or QNAP. There are WD options that also support but for potential I prefer more for the first two. But hey, let each one choose the one he likes the most. Some good NAS options that we have analyzed in Weblogs SL:. Synology DS418. Synology DS216 +. Synology DS116. QNAP TS453b.
QNAP TS251C If you want to go deeper into the subject of the NAS, you can have a look at a purchase guide. And two recommendations, and. Specialized websites where also in format, podcast, text and video tell interesting things to get the most out of them. The Mac and the file formats. Taking advantage of the fact that we are talking about Time Machine, let’s talk a bit about the file formats. As with Windows, macOS has its own file format. Until the arrival of macOS X High Sierra was HFS and HFS +, now we add APFS. These file systems are the natives with whom the system works. A unit formatted in one of them can not be read by a Windows computer. Nor for other devices such as televisions or multimedia players. If we are going to share a storage unit with other users, we need to use a compatible format. Some time ago I wrote about it here: file systems for storage units, what to use?
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Basically it is choosing between the following:. HFS +, the format of OS X. Besides being used for the operating system, it is the only format compatible with Time Machine. Hence, if we want to use a disk to make backup copies, it will have to be in HFS +. This limits its use to Mac computers but then we will see that thanks to third-party applications we can use Windows systems. NTFS, the Windows format. OS X can read discs that use that format but can not write so if we want to do it we will have to resort to third-party applications. In a world where most computers use the Microsoft system, having the disk in NTFS format can be a good option if we are going to need to connect it from computer to computer. APFS, file system used in the latest version of the system. It has important advantages such as better management of available space. And it is designed for flash storage units. It’s the future, so making the jump is highly recommended. Spotlight, as I said before, is without a doubt my favorite feature of macOS for years. Thanks to this powerful search engine you not only find everything you need, no matter where you saved it, it also serves to launch applications, make inquiries on the internet, exchange currency and much more. Spotlight can be configured from system preferences to index only those directories and files you want. With these options you can achieve absolute control of every file stored on your Mac.
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Start using it because in a short time you will fall exhausted to its power. And to give you some tips, here some shortcuts to get more out of it. Now that you have read everything, I hope you find it useful, at least something of everything shown. However, when you are new to an operating system, there is nothing better than curiosity. See what each option offers, search for the adjustments and consult all the doubts that come into your head is the key to advance and learn. I will continue writing more articles like this one, with a clear didactic vocation so that between all we make the most of our Apple products. Some will be for newcomers, others for those who have been on the platform for years. But all for us to move forward and improve our workflows and how we interact with the Mac, iPhone or iPad. And of course, any suggestion or doubt will be well received. So leave it in comments or, for those who already know me a little, even raise them through my profiles on social networks.