If the little color wheel on your Mac causes your eyes to squint, your shoulders to tighten, and your teeth to grind, then your Mac is probably running slow, and frustrating you to no end. This colorful spinning wait cursor, also called by some, “the spinning ball of death”, is the most common symptom of a Mac that is running slow.
Unfortunately, with time, this is a very common thing for all Mac owners to experience, especially if they do not clean up their Mac on a regular basis. This now leads us to the question of why our Mac is running so slow in the first place?
The Main Causes of A Slow Running Mac
Think of your Mac like your desk at home or work. If you were to never clean up your desk, and kept files that you no longer needed, your desk would be overflowing with useless files, perhaps even spilling onto nearby chairs, and the floor. In this case, what happens when you need a particular file quickly? You begin searching for it, and if it could, a little spinning ball would pop up over your head letting people know that they will have to wait as you search for that file.
A Mac works in the same way, in that it too has some files cluttering up its space. Files that are now useless, even including some duplicate files, are laying right in along the good files, making it difficult for it to quickly locate a needed file. Without a good clean up, more files will just be added to the pile, and it will continue to make our Mac run slower and slower.
Your Mac also may be slowing down, due to some unused and no longer needed applications. A good Mac cleaner software, will find not only the useless and duplicate files, but also the other things that are cluttering up your hard drive, such as: language packs, binaries, logs, and caches that need to be emptied.
Other Things That Can Cause Your Mac To Run Slow
Some other causes for a slow Mac, include the Mac’s hard drive being nearly full, having too many login items, and having too many widgets on your dashboard. These things can be fixed by getting rid of some unneeded apps, widgets and login items. When performing such a clean up yourself, keep in mind that it will leave some residual pieces of these apps on your hard drive, which will then lead to your Mac running slow.
To get rid of these pieces all together, you will need an uninstaller program. A good cleaning software utility will come with an uninstaller. The uninstaller will find all of these fragments of files and get rid of them for you. The cleaning software will also fix the other areas that need a little clean up done.
Can A Mac Running Slow Be Due To A Virus?
Although a Mac is less likely to get a virus, it is still possible that it can get one. Therefore, it is important to have a program that will protect it from assaults by viruses and other malware. One way to protect it, is by using a Mac cleaning software that not only can do multiple clean up tasks, but that also has a security application.
Using a cleaning software that includes antivirus and security protection, will help ensure that your Mac is not only safe, but also that is is not running slow due to a virus or anything else.
Turning A Slow Mac Back Into A Fast Mac
We have gone through most of the things that can be making your Mac run slow. The good news is that all of these things are not only fixable, they are also preventable.
However, just like everything else in one’s home, your Mac should have a clean up done regularly, and not just when it begins to show problems. Most of us do not wait to clean our dishes until the smell, we regularly clean them and other things in our home, so that we can prevent any smells, or any other problems. The same can, and should, be done with your Mac.
Running regular maintenance on our Mac with a cleaner software, will keep our Mac running in the high speed way we are used to. It will also stop us from ever wondering again why our Mac is running slow, as it will no longer be an issue.
Macs are known to be stable machine but just like Windows platform too, it have the tendency to slow down over long period of using it. You would experience some programs that take longer to launch and the ever dreaded Spinning beach ball will appear more often and even simple processes on your Mac machine would soon become arduous. You would wonder why is my Mac so slow.
Are you one of the Mac users that would ask themselves, why is my Mac so slow? Well then reality you are not alone. There are possible reasons why Mac performance can decrease and some of the culprit is that your Mac doesn’t have enough disk space, not enough RAM and too many applications running at once. These are the common reasons that would answer to your questions.
Unavailable Disk Space
Systems normally use hard disk for temporary storage. This is needed because cache files, temporary files and virtual memory swap files between your RAM and other resources that are running in your Mac. However when hard drive gets full of these files then expects that your system performance will really suffer. You can determine how much disk space is left in your Mac by looking over the Finder Window.
To avoid this one, just make sure that you keep at least 10% free space on your hard drive all the time. If your available Mac space is below the required minimum then expect that your Mac will generally run slower. Better free up some space on your Mac by simply deleting unneeded data removing old downloads, applications and other files and moving large and old files to other locations. If you can’t do any of these things and just need an extra room for your Mac then it’s about time for bigger Mac hard drive.
Not Enough RAM
RAM’s purpose is to store data that your CPU is actively using. RAM is faster and efficient storage but it has limited capacity compared to hard disk. If you got bigger RAM then more data can be accessed to the CPU. If you want to see some improvements on how your Mac will perform then better add an extra RAM in your machine. Just make sure that before doing so, it is compatible with your machine and just enough for it too.
Too Many Applications Running at Once
Your machine will demand more RAM if you got multiple applications that are running. If you got too many applications that you need to run all at once then expect that your machine will suffer from its speed. If you want to see better improvements on how your Mac will perform then better quit the ones that are less important to you. Doing this in a way will free up your RAM and eventually speed up.
Running Mac for longer time
Just no matter how your think that your Mac is powerful running for it the longer time will surely make it suffer from poor performance in the long run. Rebooting your Mac also means giving it at least a good night sleep. Doing this will allow the RAM to be cleared from any errors, processes will be reset and you can restart back your Mac in a clean and good state. No matter how modern and powerful your Mac, it still need some shutting down and restarting from time to time. It is advisable that you reboot your Mac every few weeks or just when you notice that your system is already acting strange and slow. This is not really a fast rule but just remember that running your Mac for months will really cause some trouble in the future. And if you don’t do this other problems will arise too.
These are just the possible reasons why Mac normally runs slow. I think this would answer to your question, “why is my Mac so slow?” So the next time that you are experiencing this kind of problem to your Mac, you know what the possible culprit is and you will know how to deal with it. Remember when your Mac performance fails, know the reasons first so you will know what possible ways you can do about it. After doing it so, you will see that your Mac system will improve unlike before.