How-To: Make your Mac run silent, cool and fast under OS X El Capitan

How-To: Make your Mac run silent, cool and fast under OS X El Capitan: ""

(Via.)

 

This is an excellent article from 9 to 5 Mac on how to improve your Mac’s operation. The two most costly steps-installing an internal SSD and adding more memory-may not be possible on your system. The other steps of making sure you’re not starting too many apps when you login, of turning off apps when you finish with them to free up memory and hard disk space, of checking for RAM-hogging apps with Activity Monitor, and of cleaning the cruft from your hard drive with an app such as Daisy Disk, Grand Perspective, or my own favorite, OmniDiskSweeper; well, you can do those at relatively little cost.

If you can’t or won’t install an SSD inside your system, see if it has at least a Firewire 800 or USB 3.0 ports. You can purchase external SSDs which can speed up your system. You’ll have to go to macsales.com, the online address of Other World Computing, if you want to find an SSD with a Firewire 800 interface. 

But I don’t plan to buy another Mac until my current Macs can’t run the next OS X update. When that day comes, I hope to purchase a 27” iMac with 1 TB of SSD as a base line. Maybe 2 TB for another $200. The way that SSD prices keep moving down, I believe that Apple will stop using hard drives, particularly the slow 5400 rpm hard drives I now have in my Macs, and move to SSDs by the time I’m looking to buy another Mac. 

 Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog