antonio m. rosario

I was helping out a friend today with her computer and she suggested that I start posting my tips for maintaining a Mac. A great idea (Thanks L! – T) so this is the first in a series of small, bite-sized chunks tips and tricks I use on my Mac to keep it running smoothly and also make it fun to use. I’ll share some trouble-shooting tips here and how I use different shareware programs to enhance my overall Mac experience. So here’s the first one:

Do you find that your Mac has been slowing down the more you use it during the day? If so, one of the issues could be that you need more RAM. You can always buy more if you’re not already maxed out. If that’s not practical, try restarting. As the day goes on, your Mac can start running out of RAM as the preograms you use eat it up slowly. Restarting can free up that RAM and help speed things along.

The other thing that eats up RAM is having too many icons on the Desktop. OS X (Leopard) treats each little icon as a full-blown open window, each of which takes a little more RAM away from other programs to use. To solve this, I clean up by dragging all the icons on my desktop to a folder called “Desktop Stuff.” Now you cannot drag (nor should you try) hard disk or DVD icons to this folder. Just drag all those documents and pictures you’re saving to this folder to reduce the clutter on the Desktop. This way, instead of hundreds of icons, you only have the one folder. This doesn’t solve the filing issue you’re creating (more about that for another tip), but it should help to free up some RAM. You may still need to restart your computer after you do this for the full benefit.

Anyway, I hope you find these tips useful.