Easy ways to speed up your Mac

Most of us have, at one point or another, found ourselves staring at the spinning beachball of death and wished our Mac was just that little bit more powerful.

Whether it's simply speed or the fact your music, video and photo collections have now whittled what you thought was a massive hard drive down to just 1GB or so, what felt fast and roomy when you bought it has become tired and claustrophobic.

So is it time to buy a new Mac? Not necessarily. Although new is always nice, it's expensive and there are several things you can do to speed up your Mac and free up space on its hard drive that will cost very little or nothing!

We're going to show you how to get the most from your current Mac, by identifying the causes of most Mac slowdowns and clearing hard drive clutter. Then, once you know where to look and what to look for, we'll show you some tools that can help you to get rid of that clutter and performance hogs.

Not everything is clutter, and if your Mac is already as lean and mean as you can get it, it may be time to help it grow with some new hardware – we'll take you through the best purchase options.

Where is all my space? Find out which files and folders are filling up your Mac

There are two things to be clear about when talking about Mac performance: memory and hard drive space. Memory, or RAM, is the thing that your Mac uses for storing applications when it's running them; your hard drive is where your Mac stores apps and other files, including music, photos and videos.

Most Macs come with what sounds like a phenomenal amount of space compared to Macs of a few years ago; a new MacBook will have 120GB of space. Yet that space goes quickly, particularly if you put your Mac to heavy use.

This isn't just a problem if you want to keep adding pictures, videos, applications or music to your Mac; your Mac's memory may run out if you're using more than a few applications at the same – if it does, your Mac will try to use its hard drive for additional memory by creating a swap file, so you need to keep at least some of it free.

Some programs also create temporary files that the program needs while they're running, even if they end up deleting them later; if you don't have enough hard drive space for the temporary files, you won't be able to use them, even if the final files would fit on your hard drive quite nicely.

These temporary files can be just a few kilobytes in size, like with Microsoft Word, for example, but with Apple iDVD or Roxio Toast, you'll need gigabytes of temporary space to burn a standard DVD.

Space issues

Probably the best way to prevent your Mac's hard drive space filling up without you realising, is to know where all your files are. Your Mac has a system of folders designed to keep file organisation easy; if you stick to it, you'll always know what's taking up space and whether you need to take easy or drastic measures to solve your space problems. Better still, by storing certain files in the right places, your Mac will gain extra functions.

There should be just a few folders in the root or top level of your hard drive. For most people, these will be; Applications, Library, System and Users; anyone with a Mac old enough to run OS 9 or Classic will have a System Folder, a folder for their OS 9 applications and an alias to their OS 9 Desktop folder, while anyone who's installed the OS X developer tools will have a Developer folder as well.

There are other, normally invisible folders used by the UNIX parts of OS X, such as usr and var, but unless you know what they're for and why you might not need them any more, touching them is a very bad idea.

As you might suspect, Applications should contain all your applications and Users contains all of your files and the files of anyone else who uses your Mac. System is sacrosanct and reserved for Apple's use – as with the invisible UNIX folders, never touch the contents of System unless you know exactly what you're doing, or you risk making your Mac either very error-prone or unable to work at all.

Library is a catch-all collection of files that your Mac and its applications need for extra functions, preferences, templates, Desktop pictures, plug-ins and more.

Applications folder

Keeping all your applications in the Applications folder not only ensures that when it comes to removing applications you no longer need, you know where they are without ferreting around, it gives your Mac extra capabilities through its Services menu, available from the program menu (so if you're in Finder, the menu called Finder).

For example, if you use Skype, you're able to highlight names or text in applications and call the Skype user with that name using the Services menu. If there's more than one user on your Mac and you want to ensure only certain applications are available only to you, you can create an Applications folder in your Home folder and any programs you store there will be able to offer Services to other apps.

Your Home folder is stored in the Users folder, together with a Shared folder that should be used for storing files that all users should be able to access: certain badly behaved programs also use it for storing preferences and other files. Normally, though, the Shared folder isn't something that builds up too many files.

Instead, it's the folders in your Home directory that are the usual source of bloat. What with iTunes storing all its music and videos in the Music folder, iMovie storing its files in the Movies folder, and iPhoto storing its library in Pictures, you can be guaranteed that your Home directory will have the bulk of the files on your hard drive before too long.

However, like the Mac, you have a Library folder of your own, which can also fill up pretty quickly as you use more and more applications.