Albeit, Mac OS X does a pretty good job of maintaining itself there are many different ways to squeeze a few more megs of free ram and a couple extra processor cycles out of Mac OS X. Additionally, if your your running low on disk space or are having some performance troubles these tips can help too. These tips will also help to maximize the battery life of a laptop. I haven’t done any formal testing, but I can tell a noticeable difference on my 2.1 Ghz. MacBook with 2 Gigs of ram. These optimizations can also free up hard drive space. I start with simpler tips and move on to more challenging tips as the article progresses.

The first step to improving OS X’s start up time as well as resource consumption is too disable all unneeded start up items. Go to System Preferences (link to a tutorial showing how to launch System Preferences) and then the “Accounts” section. Upon entering accounts select the “Login Items” tab. To remove a item, highlight the item that is to be removed and click the minus button. In my experience I found that I could safely remove all of my start up items.

Another good step to decrease resource use and improve battery life is disabling bluetooth and any type of sharing. To turn off bluetooth navigate to System Preferences. Once in System Preferences go to the “Bluetooth” section. Once in Bluetooth simply uncheck the “On” check box to disable bluetooth. To disable sharing, click the Show All button to return to System Preferences and then navigate to the sharing section. To turn off any sharing that isn’t being used just uncheck the boxes. Keeping at least 10% of disk space free is one of the most important ways to keep OS X running smoothly. The easiest way to free up disk space is to empty the Trash. To empty the Trash click the Trash icon in the dock. Once in the Trash folder, click the empty button on the upper right corner of the window. OS X will then ask if you are sure you want to remove the trash, click OK to confirm. Another good way to free up disk space is to buy a external hard drive to store pictures, movies, and other big files. My favorite external hard drive is the Western Digital Passport. If buying a external hard drive isn’t a option another way to free up hard disk space is to use Xslimmer. Xslimmer removes legacy Power PC code (older code for the G3, G4, and G5 macs) if using a Intel machine or vice versa if using a Power PC system. Additionally, Xslimmer removes all unused languages. To download Xslimmer visit Xslimmer’s Website and download the DMG. Once the DMG is downloaded run it and move Xslimmer.app to the Applications folder. The Xslimmer trial is pretty limited (they only allow 50 mb to be slimmed) but I can vouch that the program really does work. In my case, Xslimmer saved me 2.95 Gb after slimming down 189 Applications. Monilingual is a free application that is similar to Xslimmer. I personally haven’t tried Monilingual, but from a few reviews I have read it appears to be a good program.

I found dashboard to be one of the biggest memory hogs within OS X. Dashboard with 7 widgets on my system, is using 116.37 megs of ram. If dashboard is a must have, try to minimize the amount of widgets that are in use. To disable a widget click the “+” button in the lower left corner of Dashboard, then click “Manage Widgets”. In the manage widgets window uncheck any widget that isn’t being used. If Dashboard isn’t being used at all it’s best to disable it. The simplest way to disable Dashboard is the free utility TinkerTool. Visit TinkerTool’s website, go to the download section and download a copy. Once TinkerTool is downloaded, open the DMG and move TinkerTool.app to the Applications folder. Navigate to the Applications folder and double click TinkerTool to start up the app. In TinkerTool, navigate to the “General” tab and check the box “Deactivate Dashboard”. OS X must be restarted before Dashboard will be disabled.

Although many say that OS X doesn’t need to be defragmented, after a lot of heavy file moving the file system still manages to become fragmented (A image of my disk, must be clicked on to see full image, the fragmented portion of the disk is in light red). Although a Mac OS Extended partition does a pretty good job keeping files defragmented, it still manages to fragment over time. Additionally, a Mac OS Extended partition fragments free space, slowing disk write times. For this reason, I like to run iDefrag about once a month to deep my filesystem nice and neat. If all of these tips are followed, OS X should feel as fresh or even faster than when first installed. There are a few more tips to make sure everything is running smoothly, but this tutorial is already running pretty long. My next tutorial will cover some simple ways to keep an eye on out of control processes and other resource usage. Also, I will reveal a simple tip to fix 80% of system and application problems. Be sure to check back often for more tips and projects.