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.

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