*Last update: 20070818

There are many things you can do to increase the speed of your mac/apple.

Here a small collection of ideas, based on 1 year of 10.4. usage:

1. RAM:
   • Check if you have enough RAM. OS X loves to have as much RAM as possible. I would recommend at least 1GB RAM. To check your RAM-usage start your mac, do some daily jobs you normaly do and open Activity Monitor.app. Check the System Memory Tab and read the Page outs value. If this value is > 1000 or similar….more RAM could help you. Sorting for Real Memory can show you very easily how much RAM your apps are using.
   • More informations about Activity Monitor can be found here.
2. Login Items:
   • System Preferences ->Accounts -> Login Items. I would recommend a monthly check / clean-up. There is no reason to Start Applications on each boot if you are not using them each time.
3. Widgets:
   • Check if you really use all those running widgets. Activity Monitor can show you how much RAM your nice shiny widgets use. I would delete all un-needed widgets
4. Dashboard:
   • If you dont use those Widgets (3) at all….feel free to deactive complete Dashboard. This can be done using System-Tools like: Onyx or TinkerTool.
5. Desktop:
   • Clean your Desktop. Why? Well, every icon on your Desktop is a little window, and as such, has a corresponding backing store allocation in the window server. Lots of these little windows apparently can put a strain on the window server, especially when you’ve got lots of other (normal) windows open as well. Read more about that issue there
6. Harddisk:
   • I would always try to have about 10% free space on my OS X boot disk.
7. Harddisk – Defrag:
   • OS X is supposed to auto-defrag your harddrive. If you can effort it, take a look on iDefrag as additional defragmentation solution
8. Harddisk – Disk Utility
   • Check & repair disk permissions from time to time. Many mac users think that is a magic problem solution thing….well i dont think so….but go for it .
9. Routines maintenance
   • There are several apps providing some batch-like maintenance routines. I can recommend Onyx and MainMenu
10. Apple Software Update
    • If you dont read OS X related news pages….run Software Update from time to time (monthly)
11. System Preferences:
    • Check in your system preferences if there are any unused system preferences tabs that can be removed. If you do find something you don’t use you can either disable it within its menu or remove it from Ëœ~/Library/PreferencePanes.
12. Empty Trash
13. System-Preferences
    • Turn off unused services like Internet Sharing, Speech recognition, Bluetooth etc..
14. Free Disk Space
    • Monolingual can delete unused language files. I can really recommend it….but be sure that you read the project description before.
15. Choose suitable applications for files
    • Be sensible when choosing what applications open by default – think do you really need Photoshop to open just to view an image when preview will work fine? Right click on a file then select Get Info. RCDefault-App can help you here.
16. Check Software Build
    • If you have an Intel Mac then check the build of the software is universal – it might be that the application is still running through Rosetta and that a universal update is available. Activity monitor show the Kind of your running apps (intel vs. ppc)
17. Fonts
    • If you have installed custom fonts…ask yourself if you really need those masses of fonts. Otherwise get rid of them.
18. Safari
    • Well Safari is a mess, isnt it ? Actually i am not even using it, as it acts strange if it runs for several hours. An issue i never had with i.e. FireFox…but ok. There are several hints for speeding up Safari…i will only mention one inhere. I found it in a speed-up-guide at oreillynet.com but it is based on a post in macosxhints.com
19. upcoming

I guess you can find many other hints & collections in the web, here some of those i have found:

• Macworld – 34 tuning tips
• Optimized Firefox builds
• 52 ways to speed up OSX

Tags: 10.4, guide, howto, howto speed up