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I am using a Mid2010 Macbook Pro (2.5 GHz i5, 8GB RAM, regular HD (no SSD) and still on MacOS 10.9).

I am fully aware of the fact that, as the computer gets older, it may get a little slower due to more space used on the HD, more applications installed etc. etc. However, I feel that in the last few months I feel like the performance has degraded more than it should be. What do I mean by that? Well, it takes longer and longer for me to boot the Mac, applications take longer to start and it happens more and more often that they simple freeze for a short moment. Lately, I even had to use a cold reboot by pressing the on/off button long because the whole system froze when I was simply watching some videos.

Now, I am looking in how to get a little bit of the performance back, i.e., either some tips that I can directly use in the OS or some tools which help me. Unforunately, googleing them brought up a whole bunch of differerent tools, not all of them looking extremely reliable. I'd be grateful if some of you have a couple of tips for me.

Thanks

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Onyx is a great app to help you clear out a lot of the clutter you may have accumulated over the years and speed you up a bit. Be careful though, it's a powerful tool so make sure you know what you're doing with it before you do anything.

As for boot time, make sure you don't have a lot of daemons loading at launch. One easy way to check is to go to System Preferences > Users & Groups > [Your User] > Login Items and remove anything listed there that you don't need launching at startup. Anything with a default document icon means it doesn't exist and can be safely removed. Ideally, the only item that should be listed is iTunesHelper, but if you don't use any iOS devices, then you can remove that too.

Another few places to check for daemons and login items is "~/Library/LaunchDaemons/", "~/Library/LaunchAgents", "/Library/LaunchDaemons" and "/Library/LaunchAgents". If you see anything listed for software you don't use anymore, trash it. Certain other apps load daemons in to here too that you might not need; Adobe is a big culprit here with their Flash Player updater, Adobe Reader updater, and AAM. If you're unsure, leave it where it is.

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Try running Yasu, it's a free Mac app that cleans out system caches and runs maintenance scripts. It sure did help speed up my 2010 iMac when it started running slow.

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One quick fix to try: stop applications from loading automatically at login.

  1. Right click on a launcher item / program you'd like to stop from automatically launching upon login/startup
  2. Click Options
  3. Click (to uncheck) Open at Login

This prevents programs from taking up RAM that can be used for applications you actually care to run.

Uncheck Open at Login

One other thing: try using Safari for watching videos. Safari uses way less processor time than Chrome and is about 50% more efficient than Firefox. You may avoid freezes using Safari.

If you have a bunch of files on your desktop, try moving them off to another directory.

If I think of more tips, I'll update this.

Hope this helps

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