1. Back up and Stay Updated

The best way to maintain your Mac is to back up often. There are several options for backing up. I recommend using Carbon Copy Cloner (free) to schedule a back up whatever day of the week works best for you. Read more about backing up and Carbon Copy Cloner here.

Updating your Mac should go without saying. This action keeps things running smoothly and if you back your Mac up you won’t need to worry about update problems.

2. Find the CPU/Memory Leeches and Kill Them

Fire up Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor) and take a look at what your programs are sucking up your CPU. You might be surprised at what you will find. If you see some old apps/utilities that run under the hood that you don’t need quit, and remove them.

3. Check Login Items

Over time as you add applications it’s really easy for things to stack up in your startup items. Open System Preferences and go to Accounts > UserName > Login Items tab. From there find the unneeded items and remove them via the (-) button.

4. Clean up that Hard Drive

One of the greatest culprits for OS X running slow is a full or cluttered hard drive. To clean yours up grab a free copy of Grand Perspective and find the Big Unwanted Files. Grant Perspective is a small utility that graphically shows the disk usage within a file system. Find the Big Unwanted Files and remove them.

So you can see from the image below my iPhoto Folder is taking up a good hunk of my drive. So I might back those photos up and delete a few. I also found some old video projects I did for a client and so I deleted those, saving me a couple of GBs.

5. Uninstall Unwanted Applications

Using AppTrap you can remove application and rest assured that it’s related files are gone as well. Once AppTrap has been activated in System Preferences, every time you delete an application with other related files you will be asked if you would like to remove them.

6. Remove non-essential languages

Monolingual is a great utility that removes languages that you don’t want saving you hefty chunks of hard drive space. Do make sure you read to documentation so you don’t trash something you need.

7. Maintenance with Disk Utility

To double check and make sure your disks are working at top notch, open up Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) and select you hard drive and click “Verify disk” (which determine what apps can do what with what files on your Mac) and verify and repair the disk itself. These operations can take some time, but it’s worth it.

8. Back up and Stay Updated

This should go without saying. Backing up keeps

Do you have a maintenance routine? Share them with us!

8 Ways to Speed up Your Mac is a post from: The Custom Mac

What do backups have to do with customizing your Mac? Everything. You should always have a backup of your Mac’s files in general and especially if you get into heavy customizing. What will you do if you need to go back to your default OS?

Here are two of the best free backup solutions out there:

SuperDuper

SuperDuper makes backing up your files well.. super duper easy. Just choose your drive you want to copy and select the drive to copy to. You can also upgrade to the registered verson ($27.95) from there you are free to you can update an existing clone with the latest data: use Smart Update and, minutes later, your backup is completely up to date.

Carbon Copy Cloner

Like SuperDuper Carbon Copy Cloner makes backing up, syncing and hard drive recovery a breeze. And its completly free giving you tons of features such as: Scheduled backups, achieves of deleted files and backing up to networked hard drives.

Backing up Your Mac is a post from: The Custom Mac