How to Speed Up Slow macOS Catalina

macOS Catalina is one of the outstanding macOS of 2019 which everyone likes to play with features without problem. Making use of the features will definitely slow down macOS Catalina. In this article, I’ll show 10 ways how to speed up slow macOS Catalina. But before we start with the methods, you need to know why your Mac slows down. Here’s how to speed up slow macOS Catalina.

Most often we don’t realize how much CPU, memory, and disk we are using when installing, downloading, and deleting apps. One of the most common reasons why our Mac slows down is, downloading, installing, and deleting applications and software. When we download or install any software or application it takes space on the disk but when we delete it, it doesn’t free up the disk entirely. It will be there until you do a cleanup or a first aid for the disk of your Mac. In this article, I’ll show how to speed up slow macOS Catalina running and how to do a cleanup or first aid and some more methods to speed up slow macOS Catalina.

• Related: How to Speed Up Windows 10 & Boost Up Your Hard Drive

How to Speed Up Slow macOS Catalina

Check Activity Monitor

The first method to speed up macOS Catalina including Boot-time which every day happens your Mac is to keep an eye on Acivity Monitor. With this way, you can realize what’s slowing down your Mac. You can access this by going to the Finder from the Spotlight.

This application lets you know what’s going on in your Mac and you can see your whole Macs hardware and how are they performing and where are they being used. They are like memory, energy, battery, the disk. And there’s a number of different things that you can review and check that.

In terms of speeding your Mac, you should check this every day or at least a week. You can see what is your Mac slowing down. You can even find apps and services that are not visible on your desktop or in Finder. There you’ll also see some applications that you are not using but is still on your Mac and using some power in the background. This will give you a good sign of why your Mac is running slow. And what applications are causing and using most of your resources. You should let only the applications that you use and instead delete all those of which you don’t use or haven’t use it for awhile. I am pretty sure you will find many applications that have taken your hard disk space uselessly. Uninstall them now or it will again be there for some more years.

Run First Aid

To keep your Mac from slowing down, you can apply first aid Disk Utility cleanup. Go to the Spotlight and search Disk Utility. Open it up and your hard drive will be listed on the screen in front of you.

When the window opened, click on First Aid and once the pop up appeared, click on Run. This is going to go out to detect and identify any bad sectors and clean up the drive from invalid and non-visible files and fix if there’s any problem by default.

Select your hard drive and click on First Aid and click on Run. The first aid process will start right after you click on the Run button.

Once the process finishes, it will give you a summary of what it did and you can go ahead and close it. You need to do this process against every hard drive that is visible on your Mac. This process will speed up your Mac significantly because you have given you Mac the First Aid it needs.

Remove Login Items

Clearing out logging items is something that is going to help your Mac with its startup primarily. And essentially there are many apps that are running in the background that starts up with your Mac starts. You can access this by going to your System Preferences. You will get a number of different options. Select Users and Groups.

Open up Groups and you will see the profiles. If you have one or more than that’s okay. If you have more than one profile you need to repeat this process for all of them, otherwise, your Mac won’t speed up. You need to select your profile and then click on Login Items.

There you will see the items that open automatically when you log into your Mac. You can remove any of them so to remove any of the items, you can do it by clicking on the minus icon. Removing any file will prevent that app from starting which will make your Mac boot time much quicker.

You can also add items there which will give more weight to your Mac. But we don’t recommend to add files because we want your Mac to speed up. Remove weigh from your mac to speed it up. That’s how to Speed Up Slow macOS Catalina.

Reduce Visual Effects

The macOS Catalina has some great built-in features around which looks and feels amazing and one of those is some visual effects. Reducing visual effects from your Mac will make things happen quicker inside your mac. Go inside your System Preferences and go to Dock.

Within these settings, you should turn magnification off, you should look at minimizing Windows using scale effect instead of the genie effect. And you can do things like anime opening applications and we recommend to turn them all off to speed up your Mac you need to turn off all those applications.

Clear Out Cache

Speeding up your Mac performance can be done by cleaning out and clearing out your system cache. You can access your library folders by going into Go to the folder and then use a single forward slash. Put there /

Your library will get the folder on the screen and you will get your caches right there, clean them all up. You can also look at clearing out your other caches.

Head in to inside to Go folder, type there forward slash. Essentially things that are running on your desktop go to a hidden folder library, which essentially is your User Profile. You can clean them all but check to not lose your important files. Remember to reboot your computer

Keep Mac Clean

Keeping your computer clean of files and applications that you don’t actually need will defiantly help speed up Mac. Making sure that you’re clearing out your recycling bin. Reduce your desktop disorder, remove unneeded apps, and files and essentially things that are running on your desktop. Doing all those jobs can take up RAM from your computer which you probably be using for other things. Just keeping your computer clean does help especially if you have a hard drive that is not a flash or SSD hard drive. Clearing out your hard drive space and reducing the amount of clutter Can have a significant improvement in the speed of your macOS.

Re-Index Spotlight

Every single Mac installation is using a spotlight, right, which is this little top right thing on your mac Which really helps you with searching and finding things on your Mac. The spotlight needs to be indexed essentially needs to be scanning your computer and making sure that it’s up to date so that when you do search for something it knows where to find it. Sometimes re-indexing your spotlight can help with some performance concerns on your computer. It could sometimes be that spotlight is stuck.

Go to System Preferences and click on the Spotlight. Inside the Spotlight click under the Privacy tab.

Grab your hard drive from the Finder desktop and put it in the spotlight. You may get a notice. Are you sure, you want to prevent the Spotlight from searching your hard drive? Click on Ok to stop the Spotlight from searching it.

Click on Ok but after that click on the minus button at the button to reset spotlight and it’s now going to be really indexing again.

It may take about an hour or so, depending on how much files and how big your hard drive is. But that would hopefully improve your spotlight searches and your indexing clearing unneeded.

 

Clear Browser History

File history browser heavys your macOS from your browser. It is also another thing that you could look at while doing the process of speeding your macOS. You can speed up your mac by clearing out the search history on your macOS from Chrome, Google, Safari, and other search places. Go to Chrome and select clear browsing data.

Clear all the history of all the times and dates from there to speed up your macOS.

Another way to clear all the history from Chrome or Google is to go to Preferences. You will see a whole bunch of applications there that essentially are API.

Extensions from your Google Chrome and these applications can slow down Mac functioning against your browser. Clear them out and removing any extensions or add-ons that you don’t need.

You can do the same You can do it to Safari also because it is also a browser. You can click on Clear History option or You can clear the history by going to preferences and repeat the above process. Safari and google chrome are mostly similar to each other but this arent the only browsers. We have another searching application by name of Firefox.

In Firefox, goto preferences and go to the privacy and security section. You can just scroll down and you will reach to the History section. There you will be given options such as Remember history. You can clear your history right through the second option. After all of them, you will see extensions and themes.

Keep Mac Updated

Keeping your Mac updated to the latest OS updates is also important. You don’t know what’s new updates, Apple often does bug fixes which could also include things like improving speed. To access this new update you need to go to Apple 10.15.3 and update this to new versions if available.

You can also do this by going to the App Store. Go to Updates. And you will be able to see if any updates were available. Since I am using the latest version, no updates are available but in the future, it will come.

Create A New User Account

Sometimes you don’t encounter any problem with your Mac but there can be some problem underneath and that can be possibly with your account only. Your user profile might have problem and can slow your Mac so much. Go inside System Preferences, and go into users and groups. Sometimes your user profile could get corrupted. Inside your profile, there’s a lot of stuff in there a lot of junk. In all these cases it may be a good idea to go and create yourself a brand new user account.

You can do this by unlocking your Mac. First, click on the little plus button right on your screen.

Give your new account probably administrator rights.

Give your new profile a name, password, and create the user and then look at copying any file say from the desktop from the documents or anywhere else on your current profile over to the new profile. So when you log out you’ll be able to log in under your new profile and then copy the data over. And then you’re starting fresh essentially from a user profile perspective.

These are the most essential part of every computer and every operating system and fixing them up should fix up everything and speed up your Mac in result. I hope these methods speed up your Mac significantly if not at least speed up slightly or more. Try these not one or two but all of them and it will definitely help you out.