How to Speed up Slow OS X Yosemite? (Part-II)

If using the steps does not see any noticeable improvement in Mac speed, mentioned in How to Speed up Slow Mac OS X Yosemite? (Part-I) then here are few more tricks to speed up Mac machine. 

Open a new Finder window either by clicking ‘Finder’ icon from Dock or select File > New Window. Select your start up drive (generally called “Macintosh HD”) in the sidebar under ‘Devices’ section and press Command-i to explore information. Expand the ‘General’ section from the top of the ‘information window’ and check the “Available” and “Capacity” readings for Mac boot drive. If you only have a few GB of space available, then get ready for removing some items from your system. Digital photos, music and movies tend to be the main reason for low drive space, but there are many causes for this. Usually, 10% of drive space is recommended to kept as free, as this will help OS X to manage RAM properly and run at optimal speed.

accessing Mac startup drive

 

Re-Organize Spotlight’s index

If any major changes to the applications or data are done on Mac HDD then OS X may spend few times in indexing the changes. So those items can be found out via Spotlight. Mostly, few processes like “mds” and “mdworker” take a large amount of CPU percentage cause the system to slow, and increase energy usage. This should only take a short time to complete, but at times can get stuck and continually slows down the system.

To fix this problem, force OS X to clear and rebuilt Mac Spotlight index:

1. Open the Spotlight system preferences (type Spotlight in search field or hit command and spacebar keys together.)
2. Click the Privacy tab
3. Drag Mac HDD from the Finder window to the Privacy list
4. Immediately remove your hard drive from this list

When you do this, Spotlight will again take a short time span to index your drive, and then again “mds” and “mdworker” will work heavily. This time these processes would be completed in a few hours and leave you with a fresh index (organized and more accurate).

Turn off unused OS X features

If any optional Mac system services are not in use, then turn them off. For example, disable the ‘Bluetooth antenna’ in the Bluetooth menu extra, if you do not have Bluetooth devices. In addition, go through the ‘System Preferences’ (click on Apple menu on the top left corner or go to Applications menu) and disable Internet accounts, iCloud services, sharing services and other details which are not in use.

Sometimes, Apple’s transparencies issues cause the Window Server process to take up system resources for a long time and cause bad performance. After installing Yosemite, if you think that system is slow down due to this issue then go to the Accessibility system preferences, and in the Display section check for an option to reduce transparency. Moreover, clearing desktop, closing windows (which are not in use), and hiding Dock can be very helpful in this.

Manage about updating all of the software

Be sure about updating software, installed already in Mac OS X. Usually, it is advised to update these apps before upgrading to Yosemite. Once you update the software then regularly check for and apply them. These updates may be found by navigating through the ‘App Store’ (Click on Apple Menu and select ‘About This Mac’ and clicking the Software Update button).

Reinstall OS X

If the above mentioned steps are not good enough to improve Mac speed then the last option of reinstalling OS X as a solution has left to resolve slowdowns. However, before you move to this step, keep in mind this is usually not going to be a perfect solution. Please have a successful complete backup of system and then go for reinstall.