How to Increase the Speed of a Macintosh Computer

Series Summary

Computers are complex machines built upon very simple principles. They perform arithmetical operations millions of times over to transform digital information moving at lightning speed into usable human data. A personal computer's job is to help a user create, manipulate, deliver, receive, or delete media content. This is a simple, sterile definition that sounds uninteresting on the surface. Nevertheless, these fundamental functions mimic human ability in some surprising ways. Therefore, the computer is increasingly becoming an engine of the imagination, a platform for the digital life. In this free video series on Mac computers, a computer specialist, Jason Hendricks, demonstrates how to set-up and troubleshoot a Macintosh computer system. Hendricks begins by explaining how to increase the speed and customize the desktop items of a Mac. He then discusses other computer related topics, such as: how to find files, change the background picture, record sounds, open programs, clear a browser's cache, and even how to add widgets. Watch these free videos and learn more about setting up and troubleshooting a Mac today.

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Jason, a previous Mac genius and what we are going to do today is talk about some tips that you can use to utilize the performance of your computer and maximize speed. One of the first things that we are going to do is I'm going to empty the trash first of all, is having a nice clean desk top actually helps. As far as hardware goes if you install more RAM as much RAM as you can have is the best. Installing extra RAM. Having an external hard drive will also help and you can also do some system things on your system to kind of help that. We have a couple samples for you and I'm going to go into the hard drive here and I'm going to click on the user so this would be you right here and in your library you have a folder called caches. If we right click and get info on that we can see it is 10.7 megs, so that is 10.7 megs of space that we can clear off of our system by just dragging it to the trash and throwing it away. This system is going to recreate this folder as you use it. So that is one way you can clean up your cache. Another way is we are going to go into our system or no I'm sorry our disc utility which we dragged to the dock earlier, select our hard drive and we are going to repair or disc permissions. This is a really good idea to do for if you ever install software or if you add new hardware or if you add RAM or anything like that, you want to go in and repair your permissions using disc utility because it repairs all the system folder files back to kind of what they were before you installed you software and what that does is it optimizes the system files. So anytime you want to add software you want to go ahead and repair your permissions so it is doing that right now so we are going to let that finish up and it shouldn't take too long, usually anywhere from 2 minutes to 4 minutes and those are great ways that you can kind of keep your system running a little bit cleaner than normal and I'm Jason, Mac genius, previous Mac genius and I'll see you next time."