Your mac was fast when you first got it.  Now, a few months later, your mac is slow and needs a jump start.  There a four steps you can do to get your mac back in the fast lane.

1.  Unplug any new peripherals one by one.  Unplug your iPhone, printer, or other USB or firewire device one by one to see if your mac is faster after each removal.  Sometimes, a usb or firewire cable can fail and cause a slow computer.
2.  Remove any new software.  If you just installed Norton for mac or some other multi-layered software, and then your computer slowed down right after, get rid of it.  It can be the culprit.
3.  Remove any unnecessary loading programs.  You might need all your programs, but you certainly don’t need them all to load at startup which can definitely slow down your mac.  Press and hold the shift key after logging in to temporarily disable all programs from loading at login.  If you computer seems to have more pep, then you’ll need to isolate the slow starting program and remove it.
4.  Your hard drive might be failing.  To check this out, go to Disk Utility in Applications/Utilities folder and select your disk and click Verify disk to check for any errors.  If you find any errors, you should contact a data recovery specialist or computer repair company to assist immediately so you don’t lose important information.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 9:45 pm and is filed under Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.