Mac books are sleek, stylish and slick computers that can run well for years after you take them out of the box. Everyone marvels when they get their hands on the brand new apple MacBook and are sure to use it for many fruitful years to come.
Like all other computers, though, your Mac is not immune to slowdowns, bugs, and other problems, and it’s up to you to keep your machine happy, healthy, and safe. Maintaining it is, therefore, not only a need but also a necessity. Whether you carry it along wherever you go, use it once in a blue moon, or plan on cleaning it by yourself.
Here are a few tips to help you take care of your precious possession in a much better and planned manner.
Like many other computers even Macs can crash, run into hard drive problems, or has to deal with other issues that could put your data at risk. Make sure to make it a habit of backing up your data every week or two so that you can save yourself the heartbreak of having something go wrong and losing a plethora of files that you can’t salvage from anywhere else.
A full Time Machine backup is one option, and is probably the easiest way to clone your entire hard drive for easy restoring later on. You can also just drag and drop files and folders over to an external hard drive—a good idea for those who are also backing up files that no longer fit on their Mac, or use an online cloud-based service.
Regular maintenance can do a lot more to extend the life of your Mac book. It not only keeps everything operating in top shape, but it can also help find possible trouble spots before they start severely impacting you or your Mac book. Disk maintenance is often overlooked even though it can find, and in many cases, repair issues before they become problems. Disk Utility has long included a Disk First Aid feature that can be used to verify and repair problems.
Running the First Aid tool regularly can help keep your drives performing at their peak, as well as let you know when problems are beginning to appear. Another maintenance task that can be run to keep your Mac in good shape is Safe Mode, a special boot environment that will run a few tests as well as delete font, system, and kernel caches that can cause some very strange behaviour when any of them become corrupt.
The task manager is an area where we can easily check the number of processes and utilities running at a time on any computer. This in turn helps us to keep an eye on the number of utilities running simultaneously and how is it affecting the pace of the Mac book. Unknown to you, these operations are both active and passive.
However, when you are also actively performing other computing functions, these background operations compete for the power and processing capacity of your computer. You inevitably notice that your computer slows down as a result. But you can optimize its performance by shutting down background activities to allow the processor to concentrate on the main tasks you are undertaking onscreen
All Macs come with the Disk Utility program included. You can find it in your Utilities folder, which is itself stowed away in the Applications folder. Opening up the utility and running it four or five times a year is a good way to make sure that your hard disk is healthy and fully functional. First it repairs the disk permissions from the applications available.
It performs this function from the utility folder. The second operation is to repair the disk. It does this by running in a safe mode to protect the vital data from distortion and truncations. In recovery mode, you can boot into a recovery partition of your disk, from which you can run Disk Utility on your normal boot disk.
Many Mac users love keeping all of their most frequently used apps, folders, or documents on their desktop, but believe it or not, this habit can actually make your Mac slow and sluggish. The Mac needs to contribute RAM to display each icon on your desktop, so the more cluttered your desktop is, the less computing resources your machine has to use on other tasks. So keep your apps in your Applications folder, and file your other stuff away into folders. This will help keeping your Mac book good as new for years to come.
