5 things to do when Mac runs slow

When your Mac takes forever to load anything and you’re tired of asking yourself, “Why is my Mac running slow?” then it’s probably time to get it back into shape. How? First, let’s look at the reasons why your Mac is slow, and then how to make it faster.

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Remove unnecessary files

Those piles of ancient folders you keep forgetting to delete have finally gotten to you. A full hard drive takes much more time to respond, to load, and to display objects. And it results in a slow running Mac.

Never keep large files on your Desktop — they are the ones that slow Mac the most. Find files over 10 GB on your Mac and move them to cloud storage or an external drive. Simply sort your documents by size.

Disable background items

Some apps may keep a low profile and still eat up memory. For example, an unseen app keeps itself updated or scans your Mac in the background.

There's a whole class of small applications called Launch Agents — they live in the Library folder of the same name. See if you can find anything unusual here:

Finder > Go (in the top menu) > Go to Folder.
Type in: ~/Library/Launch Agents.

If you’ve found a suspicious launch agent — check the main app it belongs to and delete if necessary.

Get rid of malware

The number of Mac viruses is rising year by year. If your Mac is running slow as if something’s hogging your processor, you might have accidentally installed a malicious app.

If you know which app on your Mac is malicious, you’re half-way through the problem:

Go to your Applications folder and drag the suspicious app to the Trash.
Go to your ~/Library folder and look in the Application support folder for any files related to the app and drag those to the Trash.
Check out Applications > Activity Monitor. If you click on the Memory column, you may find potential malware processes that eat up RAM.

If you’ve run through the steps above and are still having problems, update the system software. Chances are, you haven’t installed an important security update.

Free up RAM

When you run out of RAM, your system starts using virtual memory instead. And since the latter relies on the hard drive to store info, your Mac’s running horribly slow.

Take a close look at the apps that are running currently. Close the ones you don't use, relaunch the rest. Quit and reload web browsers, since some websites consume memory even when already closed.

P.S. Don't keep a hundred tabs open.

Use CleanMyMac

If you don't feel like spending the next several hours trying to get your Mac in shape manually, there is a great solution. Download CleanMyMac and let it do the job for you. It's a simple and powerful utility to speed up your Mac. CleanMyMac has 25+ tools to solve the issues we’ve talked above, and even more. Plus, it’s super proactive — it alerts you before your Mac gets slow and runs into system risks.