#WAYS TO SPEED UP MAC OS EL CAPITAN FREE#
Apple has added some automatic resource-saving features to OS X, such as freezing currently inactive Safari tabs, but it’s wise to free up as much of your Mac’s RAM and CPU processing power as possible. Check Your Dock. Those little dots under the dock icons are there to indicate apps that are currently in use, and as a general statement, the more apps you have open at a time, the more things your Mac is juggling at once.
#WAYS TO SPEED UP MAC OS EL CAPITAN SOFTWARE#
But software is another big part of the story, so that’s where I’m starting.ġ. Part of the reason my Mac runs silent is the hardware - I’ve added a few things that make it more efficient than a stock 2011 iMac. While you could go and buy a new fridge, that’s not necessary - if you optimize the way you’re using and managing the fridge’s space, you’ll be fine. At some point, the fridge will inevitably get overloaded and dirty it’s possibly going to stop working perfectly, too.
Think of your Mac as being like an aging refrigerator that’s constantly being opened and closed, primarily holding cold food in storage, while various cold items are being taken out, then replaced with hot food that needs to chill. The first four involve mostly free software, and the last three are small hardware upgrades… How could your older Mac be that quiet?”īelow, I’ll walk you through seven steps that will help you bring your older Mac to a hushed, zen-like state. Apple didn’t start selling iMacs with silent solid state drives (SSDs) or hybrid Fusion Drives until late 2012. Rarely does the volume level in my office climb above a whisper, an experience I’ve come to love so much that I’d never want to return to a loud computer.
Thanks to El Capitan, my older (mid-2011) 27″ iMac is running better than it has in years: fast, quiet, and cool enough that it might as well be fanless. As expected, Apple’s release of OS X El Capitan for Macs was less about adding major new features than “refining the experience and improving performance” from Yosemite - in other words, under-the-hood optimizations to make any Mac run more reliably than before.