Lack of memory and hard drive space are usually the reason behind your system’s slowdown. Computer users who don’t run multiple programs at once, restart or shut down their computer often and do not push their machines to the limit are less likely to encounter this issue.
If you’re the type of computer user who likes to test the limits of your machine, you might want to take that fact into consideration, along with how much memory your computer has to work with. Ensuring you have plenty of memory and hard drive space is the best way to keep your system running smoothly. Otherwise, it’s all about what you do with your Mac.
Whether you’re a casual Mac user or not, taking out the trash is a must, although how often you need to delete things your computer has stored in its memory depends on your behavior. After all, the more you do on your Mac, the more trash builds up.
Once your Mac’s memory starts filling up, you’ll start encountering problems. When a drive is full, the operating system is unable to quickly swap information from its memory to the hard drive when needed. You can tell your drive is having issues if your cursor is a spinning pinwheel more often than it’s an arrow.
System Memory:
A good way to keep system memory available is by not leaving your system and programs running all the time. More and more system memory gets consumed if you leave them running constantly. Restart the entire computer now and then to reset the operating system’s virtual memory system and clean things up. After restarting your Mac, the system should run a lot smoother.
Check your system’s memory by using the Finder option:
1: Go to the upper left-hand corner of your Mac desktop or the dock at the bottom of the desktop to open up the Finder
2: From there, navigate to your hard drive and select it
3: Click “File” from the menu bar
4: Click “Get Info”
The “Get Info” pane will show both your hard drive’s capacity and how much space has been used. Anything less than 10 gigabytes is probably slowing you down.
If you don’t have enough memory to meet your needs, consider upgrading your Mac’s memory. The more memory you add, the better your computer will run and the less likely you’ll experience issues with performance. Deleting files that you no longer need or moving them to another drive will also help you get your computer back up to speed.