How to Speed Up Your MacBook without Spending Money

Being one of the most powerful machines, Mac offers seamless user experience with its abundant useful features. While it runs smooth & error-free when you buy a brand-new Mac for you, it may start showing signs of trouble over time like any other computer. So, if you are facing slow performance over your Mac or it is showing some other signs of diminishing performance, then it’s time to find & fix the problem. Here, certain built-in utilities and features could help you deal with the issue in an effortless manner. You can use these features not only to clean your disk space, but it is also useful to boost your Mac performance. Let’s discuss ways to speed up your Mac without spending money.

Restart Your Mac: The first quick tip you can follow is to restart your Mac. It will help you kill all unnecessary services running on your system. Here, all temporary items and services will be closed or deleted with immediate effect. Following this process, you can close & delete cache files, Mac App Store cache, clear virtual memory, close temporary files & folders, clear system cache, delete sleep images, and more.

Empty the Trash: Whatever you delete on your Mac simply goes to system Trash. Here, it remains here until you decide to clean Trash one fine day. If you are not planning to restore files from Trash, then it’s better to empty the trash to recover valuable disk space for important tasks on your system. To empty Trash, follow these steps:

• Go to Dock and tap & hold on the Trash can icon.
• Here, you will see a popup menu will appear.
• From this menu, simply choose Empty Trash option. It will instantly help you empty your system trash. 

Remove Unneeded Apps: Removing unneeded apps & programs will not only help you free up gigabytes of disk space, but it will also help you optimize Mac for better system performance. When you keep on installing a lot of apps over time and tend to neglect to uninstall unnecessary apps, it creates clutter on your system. Furthermore, your system also stores unnecessary apps & programs in the form of bloatware that requires urgent cleaning. To get rid of unnecessary apps & programs on your Mac, follow these steps. 

• Go to system Dock and tap on Launchpad.
• Here, scroll down to find apps that you wish to uninstall.
• Once you have selected the app to uninstall, simply tap and hold on the app's icon until it starts shaking.
• Here, you will see an X in the upper-left corner. Click on it.
• Click Delete to confirm the deletion of an app. 

Note: Here, you need to repeat the process with all the apps that you wish to uninstall. 

Clear Mac Cache: Cache files help you perform certain tasks in less time as it reduces the need of retrieving same data from original source again & again by storing this data in the form of cache files. While it is useful to perform certain tasks over time, it causes trouble in the long-run when a lot of cache files accumulate in remain idle on your disk space unnecessarily. Here, cache files generate and accumulate in the form of system cache, user cache & browser cache. To get rid of user cache, follow these steps. 

Note: Before you follow this process, copy the folder content to another location. It will help you get this data when something goes wrong during the process. 

• Open Finder window. 
• Select “Go to Folder” from the menu.
• Type in ~/Library/Caches and press enter to continue with this folder.
• Here, sift through each folder to find & clean unnecessary cache files. 
• Once you clean it, you can repeat the same process, by substituting: ~/Library/Caches with /Library/Caches.

Note: Now when you have cleared user cache, go to the said location to clear app cache: ~/Library/Caches. Here, you need to clean content within the specific folders. 

Manage Login Items: When you talk about overall system performance system boot time also make a difference. Here, you may notice a prolonged startup process due to a lot of unnecessary programs that launch at the beginning of the system at boot time. These startup items may include apps & programs in the form of bloatware or other items that you installed long back and stopped using for a while. If you are not using these programs actively then it’s best practice to disable them to stop them using system resources. To remove or disable unnecessary startup items, open System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items. Here, sift through all items to find & disable unnecessary ones.

Conclusion

Following a few simple yet effective built-in utilities and features, you can easily manage the disk space and speed up Mac performance significantly. Here, we have covered some most basic & effective ways, you can follow to recover valuable disk space and boost system performance. If you know more such ways to do it, then feel free to comment below. You can even share your experience if you have tried some free third-party utility to boost Mac performance.