Transcripts
1. Introduction to this class: Hi and welcome to this class. My name is Emilia. I'm an IT professional and IT training and had been working in the IT industry for over 20 years. If you're watching this, you are interested in how to get the best performance out of your Mac. So your Mac, regardless of how long you've had, it, may be running a little bit slower than perhaps when you first got it. So what we're going to be covering in this class and over the next few lessons, how to get the best performance out of your Mac, had to optimize your Mac, had to get it running faster and keeping it running healthy and faster for longer. These are things that I have done throughout my professional career, having worked across many industries. So you could do this in a work Mac, or we can do this in a home Mac and it will make your Mac run better. So do follow along the course will be very, very simple, very, very straightforward, and very, very easy for you to follow. So what do you need for this? Well, you ideally need to have a Mac now you don't necessarily have to have a Mac. You can follow along over these next few lessons without having a Mac. But I would recommend that you take this course on a Mac and actually follow along as we are going through each of these lessons, I would recommend that you go through the lesson and then you go off and actually try to incorporate that recommendation about optimizing your Mac. So at the end of every lesson, stop, open up your Mac and actually go and actually execute what we have covered. And the great thing about this being online and you haven't registered for this, is that you've got unlimited access to this class. So you can go back and re-watch it to ensure that you can then make sure that your Mac stays running healthier for longer. So as I said, have yourself, your Mac, we are running this course on MacOS, Big Sur. But if you are running an earlier version of macOS or even a later version, that's fine. The steps that we're going to be covering in the outlines that we're going to be covering are the same. So you won't be losing anything if you are running a different version of macOS. So once you have completed this course, I would highly recommend for you to let me know, add your details around this little project. My project for you is to get your Mac running faster. So do let me know how you go. Let me know if some of these have worked for you, if some of not work for you, and I'm always very, very happy to answer your questions so that we can get your Mac running bet up for longer.
2. First Aid + Disk Utility: Welcome to the session. We're going to be looking at the very first item, he being cleaning up your Mac to make it work faster, cleaning up permissions using some software that is built into your Mac, right out of the box. Depending on how long you've had your Mac, your Mac could run slower and not be performing as well as it should be. Over time. This is completely normal and will happen, especially the longer you've had your Mac and the more files and folders that are on your Mac over time, your files could get corrupted. The permissions could get corrupted on those files. You could have issues with reading and writing things. Your Mac could be slow when it comes to opening up files and folders on your Mac as well. Now inside every Mac, of course, you've got a hard drive, a hard disk inside, whether it be a laptop or a desktop. And then over time, the actual partition on that Mac could also cause issues, could also get into some strife over time. So right out of the box on your macro, regardless of the version, whether you're running the latest macOS operating system or earlier versions, there is some software that you can open and you can run some essentially some first aid, some health checks on your Mac to get those things clean it up. So right here on iMac, we're going to use some software called Disk Utility. You can access it in two different places by going either via, you'll find out into the applications folder and then scrolling down to utilities. So there's a folder called utilities inside applications. Of course, this is the folder where all of your apps sit, all the apps that you have installed onto your Mac, and then you have utilities right here. And inside this folder there is a application called Disk Utility. You can also access these bug going into the spotlight on the very top right-hand corner, the little magnifying glass typing in disk utility as well. And pressing into that we did here you'll see it's broken down into two separate section on the left being your hard drives that are inside or connected to your Mac. And then the right is the information about those hard drives. On the left you see that there's internal and external, Internal, other hard drives inside of your Mac. So whether you'd be on a desktop, whether that be an iMac and Mac Pro, a Mac Mini for example, or on a laptop, a MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, that is considered an internal hard drive. External is a hard drive that is external to your Mac. So one that is connected via USB, fundable, or some other sort of connection. I would recommend running Disk Utility, the actual checks, the first aid against every disk that you use on your computer. The most important disk, of course, is your primary hard drive, which is this one right here. The internal ones. If you have more than one, you run it on both. Secondly, it's important to run it on your externals, especially if you're finding that over time your external hard drives may be running a little bit slower. It's not as fast as it used to be able to copy data to it or copy data off it, or read data off of it. So if you've got a movie, for example, on your external hard drive and it's a little bit slower than it used to be. It could need a bit of a cleanup. So what we're gonna do is we're going to run some command here, a little sub-command called First Aid. First stage is what's going to scan your hard drive and make sure that anything that is corrupted or not working as it should is cleaned up. And you can do this in a couple of areas. And I recommend that you do do this in a couple of areas. Under internal, the very top level, this is your hard-drive, the very top level harddrive. And then things within it are essentially the volumes inside of your hard drive. So I would recommend running first state against here and then running it against these two in here. You may have more, you may have less, but run it against every single one of your hard-drive listed, all the actual volumes listed. Now what will happen is when you do run first aid your Mac, he's going to prefer perform slightly slower. It's because it is doing a lot of tasks in the backgrounds. Your computer could literally stop working altogether, or it could just be running in a performance degradation and states that is completely normal because it is just checking a lot of stuff on your hard drive. So with the top harddrive select, you see that on the right. It now shows me information about my hard drive. This is stuff that is good to know. The name of your hard-drive, the size of your hard drive, and some further specs including the connection, what sort of type it is. This is a solid state, so this is an SSD harddrive. Depending on whether you have SATA, SSD, the performance may be slightly different. In a future video, we will talk about the benefits of an SSD. So stay tuned and watch that one as well because we're going to talk about why in a sustained may help you improve your max spade. So other than that, now we are ready to click on first dates and making sure that the top-level here is selected, we now click on First Aid and it says at first said it will check the disk for errors. And it will repair the disk if necessary. So if you're happy with that, then you click on the Run button. Once the operation is complete, hopefully see a little tick and it says that it is complete and click Done to continue. And you can see a little bit more about exactly what it did. This is more if you're interested, these set it that it check the partition list, the map size. And it did a few other clean ups right there and that the operation was successful. If yours wasn't successful or you have a little era that he's being displayed. What I'd recommend is give your Mac a reboot. Once you've logged back in, go and try this again. So if you're happy with that and it's all successful, click on Done. Now we've done it on the very top level. Now we want to do it on the volumes underneath this particular top HA DR. And you go into each of these, it actually will show you that out of this particular volume, you've got this much used and this much is free. And then there's the yellow volume and a bit more information. And then the same thing with this one right here. So select that other volume right here. Clicking on first state. Again, it'll say that hard-drive making sure that that is the correct one it matches up. He first said we'll check the volume, we click on Run. Now will give me a little warning verifying that the startup, this will cause the computer to stop responding and run slow up. This could take a little bit longer because it's now going into essentially a second level Li, growing a little bit further into your max hard-drive structure, the file structure of the folder structure. So this computer could run slow up and it may take minutes to hours as it says right here. So once we good, You can click on continue. The process should now complete and it should give you a little ticky of everything has been successful. You will definitely see right from here my the details area. It's done a lot more stuff. Okay. It's actually checked a lot more things. And if your computer had issues like permissions, issues, things like that, it will actually show in here files or folders the path that it's scanned, what it did that it in Canada and Era, and then he fixed it, et cetera. Similarly, if you have an issue on he, perhaps I would recommend turning off your Mac, turning it back on and then coming back and then rerunning the first aid. If you're happy with that and we click on Done. Now similarly, you would do it to the other one right here, selecting that hard drive, clicking on the first state, and then run that again on that other hard drive or external hard drives. I'm did mentioned that it is recommended to do it on the external hard drives as well. It's not as required to make your Mac run fast stuff, but this is making the hard drive itself run faster. So you can select that hard drive right here. Click on first day. Alright, say run. And there's not going to scan that particular hard-drive right here. Okay. That is done. Similarly, go into the actual volume itself within the top-level hard-drive. Click on first day it again, and then click on Run depending on the size of the hard drive. This may take a little bit of time. This one is a four terabyte hard drive and it also depends on how hell, I guess, long you've had the hard drive and how many times you've actually run something like first state. And if you've never run it before and you've got thousands of files potentially. It could take a little bit longer as well while it goes and scans everything and cleans it up. So you'll see that he's now completed, gives you a bit of a summary of what happened and we can click on Done, see that the hard drive is still unmounted. So I can select that hard drive variety, right-click and then say mount. That will then mount that hard drive back onto my desktop. So that is the end of this session. Looking at first I looking at disk utility to go and clean up your Mac, your file permissions, your partitions, and other things that may have slow down your back part of it.
3. Understanding the Activity Monitor: In this session, we're going to be looking at an application called the Activity Monitor. This is an app that is loaded, that is installed by default. It's essentially a system application that's installed by default. On every modern Mac. I'm running a new on macOS operating system, but you could be running an earlier version that is completely fine. The application will still be there. Activity Monitor essentially shows you the activity that is on your Mac, your Mac, he's performing what applications are running on your Mac, how much resources or those applications using, how much RAM is being used by that app, how much CPU is being used by that app? How much hard-drive space it's taking up, how much network spade isn't taking up. All of these are very, very important. And the great thing about Activity Monitor is it clearly will show you which applications are chewing up the most resources on your Mac. And then potentially that he's causing your Mac to not be running as well as it should be. So here are now Mac, we're going to open up the activity monitor and you can open it up a couple of ways by going into the Finder and then into the applications folder. We're going to click on the spotlight leg on the very top right-hand corner and click on Activity Monitor and just taught it in right there. So here is Activity Monitor tab. There's a number of things going on here. You'll see that it is broken down, up the top via CPU, memory, disk, and network. We're going to cover each of these. And then the actual body of the actual application shows you the process name. What is the process that he's currently running? Every process that is running on your Mac, you see it's a huge lists look at that. Who would have thought there'd be so many things running on your Mac at the same time. Now a lot of this stuff is all system process stuff. So this is stuff that central for your Mac to run, okay, So some of the stuff will need to be kept on there and it's good to know. And because we're looking at CPU, you've got the CPU percentage. So how much of your percentage of your CPU, so your CPU being 100%, how much percentage, what is the split between the applications that are running on here against the actual CPU. The CPU time, the threads and the idle wake up. So we're not going to cover these specifically here, the percentage GPU. So this is the graphics itself. How much of the graphics is being used by a particular application? The GPU time, the PID, and then the user. So who is the user that is currently using that? Okay, so you'll see that for example, I've got Emilia, I'm logged in as Emilio Using QuickTime Player. And Emilia is the primary user of this particular application right now, because I've only got the one user logged in. That's why Emilia was the only lose at listed. If you have more than one user logged in and you haven't logged out of that user. Perhaps you've just switched accounts, or perhaps the account is still logged in some way or there's some resources still being used by another account that's also on your Mac, perhaps a family member or friend. They're also going to show up in here. Apart from the actual users of the computer, you've then got a whole bunch of backend account services processes, right? So don't touch some of these other uses, just focus on the users that are the ones that you know about. The percentage CPU clearly shows you what applications are using up the most CPU traffic. Down the bottom, you'll see that the system is using this much user. So myself is using this much and then idle 72 percent. So actually at the moment my CPU isn't running too bad. Most of it is just idle, is just sitting there waiting to do something so it's not too bad. You can see the CP loaded a nice little graph, essentially how it's trekking, okay, and how many processes and threads are currently being used? We go a little bit more technical here. We won't cover that in this training video. So right here, you can sort these quite easily as well. You can sort of by name, by just clicking on process name. And you can see it again, starts from a all the way down, okay? And you can see exactly what is running. You can also sort it by Cp, which is what I find helpful. You sorted by the thing that he's running the most. Okay, so here are the things that are running the most. So you'll see that the top applications right here, most of these are back-end system services. Okay, So this is Windows Server, so we're not Windows like Microsoft Windows. This is an application, essentially a service that magnates is essential for displaying things on your display. So we're not going to touch that stuff. The stuff that we're interested in are the ones that are listed under your name. So the ones that we're concerned about specifically are the ones that actually have an icon generally, which is going to be a real life application. So right from here you can see that activity Monitor is actually chewing up a percentage of my CPU, QuickTime player being the next one. And then other ones, the Finder, Google Chrome's I've got my browser open on a different window. So these are all the apps that I've got running. You see that clearly they're being used by me and the percentage. Now in my case, it doesn't look too bad. It actually is running quiet. Well, if you have trouble applications, if your Mac is running slow. It could be because there is an application that he's chewing up all of those resources. So going into he verifying it and clearing out stuff is quite helpful. What I generally like to recommend is go in here and maybe once a week, once every couple of weeks just to make sure things are all running okay. If your Mac is running Poli, go into the activity monitor, check what app is using up all your CPU. I've just selected team viewer. This is an application that is running in the background. It's not really doing much. But if it were a problem case, let's say team V0 is chewing up a whole bunch of my resources. You can force quit the application right from here. Actually kill the process. So selecting that and then clicking on the little cross right here, that will stop the process altogether. I show it you want to quit this process. Quit or Force Quit. Quit means it will just try to safely quit it. But of course, you probably know that over time sometimes applications can get stuck. And the only way to get out of it, It's actually do a force quit essentially, you'll just saying, close the application. I don't care if I lose data. Or, you know, if, if, if it loses that up and you just want to quit it because it's stuck, for example. So we're gonna just say quit. And then if everything is working correctly, team viewer should now be gone. So it's all looking good. So similar to CPU, you've got memory, of course, memory vein, the internal RAM on your computer. The more RAM you've got, the better your computer's going to run. You can also say straight away from he, Windows Server being a process that is running in the background is taking up 1.15 gig of RAM. So you'll see down the very bottom, you've got a little bit of a summary here, physical memory, this Mac has 16 gig of memory installed onto it. And right now, 11.5 gig of memory is being used by application. Right from here you can see what applications and chewing up most of your RAM. And you can close those applications out. That way those applications stop using that RAM. If you are saying that over time as you go into this activity monitor and you're saying that the memory is actually quite high in the US compared to your physical memory. It could be a time for your Mac to get some additional RAM. So how, how much energy is that particular app using? So in the overall percentage of your actual Mac, you can, you can see down the bottom of the energy impact and then the battery remaining charge batteries charged time, when I say is three hours, are spent on plugged in to ISAF for three hours. Now this Mac, this is a MacBook Pro by the way. And you can see straight away which applications are chewing up the most energy on your Mac. So if you're on a laptop and you're running on battery, and your battery used to run for eight hours, but now it only runs for four hours. Go into here, check out the energy. Let's see if there are particular applications that are actually chewing up a lot more of your battery than other apps, gives you a good indication. Perhaps there's some apps in here that you shouldn't be using because they just chewing up all of your energy, all of your battery, disk being your hard-drive. Every Mac will have a hard drive, of course, built-in, and that's where your macOS operating system is installed and all of your apps are installed into here, how is the Read, Write going? How, how much data is being written to your hard-drive? How much data is being read from your hard drive? If there's an application that he's reading and writing data consistently to your Mac back and forth, back and forth. And there's a lot going on that could be causing an issue, performance issue on your disk. So the disk could be performing slow up, which means then your Mac performs slower. Sometimes it's quite normal for an application to have to read and write data on a disk, okay, So if it's normal, that's fine. But sometimes applications would just start reading and writing stuff crazily. And the disk just gets filled up and just can't cope with that. Read and Write going back and forth. So go through and verify that similarly to CPU memory, you can actually select the application, close it, or perhaps make the decision on whether you want to remove that application altogether. Finally, ease our network. So down the bottom we've got a bit more information here around packets. In packets out the data are saved data since we won't go too much into detail around the technicalities around network. But essentially every computer has on the Wi-Fi or plugged over a network cable, a blue Ethernet cable. And then there's network traffic. So you going out to the Internet, you watching this video on line, you'll computer is grabbing stuff via the network to the Internet, pulling stuff down. So this is back and forth between your computer over the network to the Internet, which is another network on the Internet, the same way at home, you've got a device, you've got a computer, talking to another computer. You might have a smart phone on your WiFi, you'll make based on your Wi-Fi. There's a lot of traffic on your WiFi network or on your home network. This shows you clearly how the traffic is going and perhaps what applications are chewing up the most amount of data. So it's very common. For example, if you're like Dropbox, it will be a good one. So Dropbox because I am sinking my files over to the Dropbox Internet server and the server up on the Dropbox site. Data going back and forth could be high if you've got your browser open. So going, I've got Google Chrome. Right now, it's pretty okay. But if I'm in the middle of downloading a file or I am deleting a really big fall off the Internet. Google Chrome will be a lot higher listed in here because it is a lot more busy. Because your network is a lot more busy, that could be causing some congestion on your computer. Now overall, the Mac could be impacted, but it's more that the performance of the network would be impacted. So if your Internet is running very, very slow, a good time would be to go into here and check, well, is it the internet or is it the fact that there's an application chewing up all of the resources on the network or on the Internet from my computer. You can clearly say that ride from me. You can stop the process. You can remove that application if it's causing you problems. So that is the summary of the activity monitor. Hopefully that helped you out, as I recommended at the start of this video, go into this quite regularly, especially if your computer is running slow in any way, even if it's on the Internet, if it's copying files, if it's opening up files, go in. Getting to a good practice into a good habit of checking it from time to time to make sure that things are running well.
4. Start Up Items: How long does your Mac take to start up? Perhaps when you first bought your Mac, it was super, super quick. You turned it on and then you present it with the login screen, you putting your password and you got in and it was so quick. But then over time, your max dose to take longer and longer to start up. There are few things that you can do to speed this up. One being looking at what is called the login items or the startup items. Essentially, these are applications or files a starting up every time your Mac stats up. So what happens is when your Mac is booting up, it presents you say with the login screen you've logged in. And then in the background it has to start opening up all of these applications in the background. So it's gonna take a little bit longer for you to actually get into your Mac and start doing your work. Applications that do start up automatically in the login had been placed there generally by the application. When you've installed a new app, it will ask you, Do you want this to start up automatically when your Mac birds, and perhaps you've said yes, perhaps the application has just recommends for that to happen so that every time it boots up, it starts up. But it can take a little bit of time off your setup time. And because these apps are also running in the background, essentially they're always open in the background. The overall performance of your Mac is impacted. So inside your Mac, you've obviously got some CPU and some RAM and some other resources in there. And a portion of those are going to be allocated to these applications that are running in the background. These applications are essentially always opening the background, perhaps without you even knowing. And that will remove the resources from you being able to use them in other places, you open up a browser and you may not have as much resources, or you open up a game and you may not have enough resources to play that game because they'd been used or occupied by some of these other applications that are open in the background. So right from heat rider now Mac, as I said, we are running macOS. This is the latest operating system. You may have a different version, but the process is really the same. We're going to go into the system preferences area here on our Mac. In the very top left, left-hand corner for the Apple logo, we're going to select that Apple logo and select System Preferences. Once he's opens up, there is a lot of stuff in here that you can do. This is essentially the configuration area on your Mac to let you go and customize your Mac and the back-end things. Maybe the look and feel and some other things about how your Mac operates. It's got a number of things including your name, all of these different applications right in here. But the one that we're looking at specifically is users and groups. So this one right here uses in groups. We can just select that. In here. You've got all of the users listed that use your Mac. So in my case, I am the only user of this particular max to only I show up Emilia and I'm an administrator and admin for my compete up. And that is it. If you have more than one user on your Mac, let's say you have you, you Patna, you kids, what have you. You need to go into here and do this process for each and every one. Because every login, every account that is listed in here, every login has its own profile, which means it has its own applications that perhaps a starting up when they login, when the, when the, each of the users login themselves. Now what you need to do is I say do it against H one. You don't have to login to each one of these uses and go and action is but the computer that you're logged into right now, the user that you're logged into has to be an admin to be able to go and change it against the other accounts that are listed. What you wanna do is select the user, right, the current user by myself, all the other uses. And then you've got login items right here. Next to possiblities login items in heat. It says that these items will open automatically when you login. That's nice, but you might not actually want these applications to stop. And you'll see that it has a list of all of the applications. The applications and file is actually the kind is there an application or is it a file? So go and look through this list of applications or files, and you need to determine which app you think needs to be in there as part of the boot sequence, as part of your Mac starting up. Does that application need to open up? That application need to be running all the time in the background. So in my case, chess or look, chess, I play it every so often to great game. But I don't need chest a startup every time. So I can select chess and I can click on this minus button right here, and that removes chess from within here. Stickies, well, I've got a sticky notes. Well, sometimes I put reminders into my sticky notes to do things, you know, like on my to-do list for every day or something similar. So I like to have this open so I'll leave my stick is in there. What about Dropbox? Well, Dropbox just by the name, keeps my falls in sync up to Dropbox. Alright, so I have some files on my computer and I want to have them in my Dropbox folder that is also kept on the Internet and I can access those files from wherever. So I think that's important to be running all the time. So I'm going to leave Dropbox in there. What about text edit? Well, I don't really need that. So I'm going to remove that Microsoft Boyd. Well, I don't need that to start up either. Here I've got an EAA task list. An Excel spreadsheet will do a one-piece to startup every time. While in the olden days I did because I found it important. But now it's just annoying that every time it starts up, my max dots up, it shows up. So you might not want that. So I'm going to remove it. And the same deal with Google Chrome. I don't want my browser to stop every time. One drive, it's another one like Dropbox. I've got some files that I want to keep in sync. I wanted to keep that. Now it looks a lot cleaner. So essentially I've just removed a number of applications that now the next time I restart my Mac, they will not automatically stop and then will not be clogging up resources on the backend on the background of my max. So that is perfect. You will find that just by removing those, you have gotten yourself some time back as your max dots up. Now, the other thing this is just, I guess a nice feature to have is that now that you know where this feature is, this option is to start automatically items. If you do have an application or an actual file that you do want to start automatically. Then you can click on the little plus right here, and you can now go and navigate to applications, perhaps that you do want to start up automatically puts a nice little feature to have. So for example, you want the calculator to setup every time you can go in and add that. And that will now start up. The next time you boot, your Mac Calculator will start up. I don't need it but I'm going to remove it. But just remember, the more stuff you having here, the slower your Mac will start up and the slower your Mac overall will run because it is running a whole heap of processes in the background. So remember, do that for the active user, for the user that you're logged in, in my case being the admin. And then also do it for all of the other user accounts that are on your computer. Of course, you may need to just verify with the other members of your family or your friends who are using that Mac, whether those applications and needed at startup. Now, remember, you can always add these back. So let's say later on you discover a look, I've removed one by accident. You can go back into here, click on plus and then add it back in. The seas, not removing the applications. The applications stay there. You don't actually removing them from the Applications folder altogether. They're still there. You can still navigate to the finder applications and open up the apps. You just removing them from starting up automatically. So that is the end of the session. Hopefully you found that helpful and hopefully that is one of the items that has helped Joe Mack run slightly better.
5. Visual Effects & Animations: Welcome to this session. So we've got ourselves a Mac, Mac OS. We're going to be looking at how to speed it up by reducing what's called visual effects. Now if you're on your Mac at all, you may find that it just looks and acts and feels very, very media visual driven, as opposed to say a Windows computer, windows can be a little bit more static while the Mac just feels a little bit nice sigh. It's definitely aimed generally at more creative types of people. So as a result of that, Apple have putting a lot of nice visual effects into the Mac to make it look and feel a little bit better. So what we're gonna do is we're going to open up the system preferences and show you some settings that you can change within your system preferences, essentially your Mac settings. To make your Mac works slightly better, you will get a little bit of a reduction in what's known as visual effects. We're going to show you what these look like, but you'll see that I've got the icon here in my doc, but you can also get it in the very top left-hand corner in your Apple logo. Clicking on that and then selecting system preferences. Now of course, this shows you all of your backend system services, applications that you can go in and customize certain things. And from within here, you've got an application cold or a service called doc and menu bar. So we're going to open that up. Now within here, there's a few things that you can look at changing to make things work a little bit differently, but we'll also provide you better improvement of speed on your Mac. Down here we've got our doc. You'll see that right here. This is a little thing that's very unique to the Apple Macs. And this shows you all the applications that I've just got, essentially a shortcut. So you have an, open them up very, very easily. You can add things into, he can remove things in D. But as you can see is when I move my mouse over it, I get this little effect where it's actually making my icons big up as I move my mouse across it, you may, you may not have this, but if you do have this, turning it off improves performance slyly because this is what's called a visual effect. Essentially, it's a little animation that runs in the background. To make this cool little thing happened, disabling that you may see a slight improvement. So from within here, you got a couple of things. Under the magnification area. You can see right away, you can turn it off altogether. Now magnification is off. That particular visual effect is now disabled. Okay, that could be one from that you could try to do. The next thing is minimized window using, there's a couple of options, Jamie or scale effect. Now what is the difference? Let's just have a look at the Gini effect. This is a default setting that I've got right here. Have a look at this particular window when I minimize it. Okay? You may have seen little effect where it just shrinks it down slowly and then throws it into my document. Okay. That is also a visual effect and it requires a little bit or resources to make that thing happen and make it look really cool. So you can actually go into here, select scale effect. Now I minimize it. It's just a simple close. Bring it down. No fancy effect at all. You may save a little bit of resources by changing it from Genie over to scale. Something else you could try to do, right? He is to animate opening applications. So if you have that ticked on, disabling, it removes a little bit of an animation to animate when you are opening an app on your Mac. So you could also turn that off. Something else that could help ease this option right here to automatically hide and show the dock. It's always visible. If I tick this, it's automatically hidden. I have to move my mouse down to the bottom of the screen to make it show up, right? So by having it off, you're actually saving a little bit of resources because the donkey is not always there. The next thing is by going back into the main area here on System Preferences, selecting the General tab. In here you've got an appearance thing. You may notice that your Mac can go light, can go doc I, that looks cool, or can go auto, auto. It will automatically change it from light to dark at a specific time. That's another effect. Okay, there's gonna be a little bit of processing that happens in the background to change it from light to dark automatically. So I would select one or the other and just leave it like that. In my case, I like docs. I'm going to go and change it back to dock. Don't know why it was set to light, but Doc looks better. The other thing as well, I forgot about this is that doc will actually use a little bit of less energy on your computer because they're more DACA colors. So the LEDs on your screen then have to project as much light. So a doc actually is a little bit more efficient than a light theme would be. Another thing that could help. That isn't necessarily a visual effect, is under the desktop, is maybe changing your desktop to something that's a little bit more plain. Now this is completely optional, of course, because some people love to have their own background. But the background can take a bit of resources away from a compete up, especially if it's a very, very large background. Because the load that in the background and the background in the background when your computer starts up and when it's running all the time. So what you could also do is just change it to just a plain color, something like that, may get a little bit of resources back if you are having performance issues, but it's completely optional. As well as that look at getting images at a slightly smaller. So you can actually go and find the dimensions of your screen by going back into the system preferences area right here and displays, you see that by default it's set to this top option, default for display, I can click on scaled. And this is the resolution of my screen. I've got a nice big wide screen on here, big wide curved screen. So that's why my resolution is quite big. But if you are getting backgrounds, you diluting wallpapers from the Internet, don't get something that he's bigger than what you've got because you are actually still opening up a very, very large image on a screen that, and it's just shrinking it on a screen that isn't that dimension. So look for background images that are around the resolution that you're looking at it that way you are ensured to be a k. But again, it's completely optional whether you just want to leave the background as 0s and just keep it very, very plain. That's it for the visual effects video.
6. Maintain Files + Folders: Welcome to this next video. Keeping your Mac clean is something that a lot of people do not do. This is not just mac users, these are even people who use Windows computers. It's just, you get into a habit of just collecting files, collecting follows, installing applications over the years and years and years. And all of these contributes towards your Mac performing pulley. There's a number of things you need to consider here. If we're thinking about it from a very, very high level, get rid of files and folders that you don't need off your hard drive and install applications that you are no longer using and remove items from your desktop that don't actually need to be on your desktop. Let's look at each of those three. We're going to talk about them. Here we are now Mac. He's the first thing. We've got all of our folders. We've got to find that open right here. And we've got a bunch of L favorites. And then you've got documents, you've got applications, you've got movies, he got music, you've got downloads. Why don't you go through each of these folders, identify files that you do want to keep, files and folder that you do want to keep and then keep them if they need if you don't need them, remove them. If you do need them, but you don't need them on the computer, perhaps back them up to an external hard drive, to a USB drive, or to another computer, or even back them up to the Cloud and then remove them from your Mac. He suddenly to consider your Mac, will come with either a standard SATA hard drive or SSD harddrive. So this is the actual hard disk inside of your computer with all of your files and kept. A standard SATA hard drive has moving parts, so it's actually a disk with a little needle that moves up and down. And over time that disk can become fragmented. It actually sounds to perform poorly overtime. The more and more files you've got here on your computer. And the more and more you're deleting things, adding new thing, cleaning up things without running actual checks and tests and disclaim apps and they sort of things over time, you'll Mac can start to perform slowly because of this disk issued. Also, the full-on your desk is, let's say you have a one terabyte hard drive inside your iMac, for example. And you are now down to maybe one gig or two gigs left, right? If you've got an ID hard drive, that computer is going to run slowly or slower than it has because your hard drive is so full. So get into a good habit of removing files that you don't actually need files and folders to free up space on your hard drive. If you have an SSD harddrive, a solid state hard drive, this problem isn't as prevalent because an SSD doesn't have moving parts, so it's not gonna get fragmented the same way that a Saturday squared. But now it's generally a good practice to keep your files and folders in check. You don't need to keep all of your files forever just because you have the storage and the capacity, I'd recommend try to keep your hard drive is empty as possible with only your most essential stuff. So go through your, all of your favorites, write your documents, your downloads. Downloads is a big one. You're going to open up your browser's, your web browsers use Chrome or Safari or Firefox, and you're downloading files by default, they're going to be downloaded and stored inside the downloads folder. So it's very common that over time this thing is going to start to get very, very, very, very full. Unless you've changed that directory structure to somewhere else and maybe it's downloading to the desktop or something. Downloads is generally that that folder. So go through he if he needed keep stuff, move it to a correct folder. If you don't delete it on that note, try to not only remove files and folders that you don't need, but try to keep them maintained and claim. This is more just a good practice thing. Don't have your stuff all over the place. I've seen too many times computers where there's just stuff everywhere and when you want to look for something, it just makes it so much harder. So apart from downloads, go through the movies, the music, the pictures, delete stuff. You don't need. Cape, a lame computer wherever possible. Applications is another one. You've probably got a whole bunch of applications listed in here. Do you need the mole? If you don't need the mole, then delete them. You can literally just go and right-click and move to bin. For most applications, sometimes on the Mackey doesn't actually truly deleted old correctly. So sometimes you have to open up the app and uninstall it that way. One that I use quite a bit is clean. My Mac, apple lets you essentially uninstall the apps cleanly just in case there's any residual files sort of scattered around your computer. So go and remove applications that you don't need. Okay. Try to keep your dock also clean. So we looked at the dock before around the genie effect and they sort of stuff. Here is all the icons that I have in my doc. If you don't need something in there, take it out. You can easily move something out by just selecting the icon and then dragging it out, and then drag ones in that you really need to Cape. Okay? Now, here's the other thing is when it comes to just cleaning up your Mac and keeping your Mac clean, keep your desktop claim. Look at my desktop. It looks pretty good. It used to be a lot worse. Desktops can be cluttered. And desktops, the icons on your desktops contribute towards the performance, the speed of your computer. Alright, we looked at startup items earlier when you'll max dots up all of your icons on your desktop, especially if you've got little thumbnails, you'll see right here I've got three little videos. These are little thumbnails. They have to load in the background. You'll see that I've got some additional information on some of my way to actually tells me that little description. It actually tells me the hard drive space. You'll also see that my icons specifically show me in my folders how many items I've got within my folders. Some files also tell me that the size of those files, this is old data that needs to be loaded when your Mac starts up, as well as that it's actually there all the time on your desktop. So it is consuming something, even though it may be small, it is consuming something. And this is true for an SSD. I'll offer a SATA hard drive. So try to keep your desktop clean as well. Try to put things into folders. The Mac has got this great thing called stacks. We can actually essentially put things into a really cool stack of applications or folders. Use these features, use the stacks, use the folders, put stuff into different areas in your finder and just keep everything as clean as possible. We mentioned Clay, my Mac before, something that I used claim iMac a lot for as well is you can actually open up the app and actually scan your entire hard drive. And it gives you like a nice big map of all of your files and folders and essentially all the folder sizes all in this one nice map. So sorry, right from here, right from the app, you can see exactly where all your data is going. Alright, so if you don't know, I've deleted everything and I can't find where all my stuff is. Like, why do I not have enough hard drive space? This will show you exactly where all the folders and the files that have the largest amount of storage being used. So a few things that he has to summarize. Remove files and folders that you don't need. Keep your files and folders claim. Remove applications that you don't need and keep your desktop claim. So that's it for this video, this tutorial. Hopefully, this is some of the stuff that will help you out in getting your Mac running. Excellent.
7. Spotlight + Re indexing: We're gonna be talking about re-index in your spotlight. On the very top right-hand corner is this little icon that is like a little magnifying glass. And this thing, spotlight search, really lets you search your entire MAC to find your files and folders. It makes it very easy to open up applications where you don't know where they may be. So right from here I can type in C, a L, C, and open up the calculator app right from there, without me having to go into my finder and into applications and open up the calculator. It actually scans during TY computer and indexes all of your files and folders so that it can be searchable within your spotlight. Spotlight is brilliant and it saves a lot of time when you're trying to find things. What can happen with spotlight over time though, is it can become corrupted, can stop functioning as well as it should be, right? Sometimes spotlight can even get stuck where it's no longer searching for things or you're adding a whole bunch of new information, u dot r onto your computer. And that isn't being indexed within spotlights know being indexed correctly, it could be that your spotlight has gotten corrupted somewhere. So what you can do is to ensure that that runs a little bit better, is you can do what's called re-index thing spotlight, essentially clear at all the settings from spotlight and then get it to start again. Get it to do a full refresh, a full new scan of your entire computer. It will take a lot of time because there's a lot of files that it needs to go and search for an index and that sort of stuff, but it is worth it. One other thing that I found many, many times, especially when a Mac is running slowly, is sometimes it's because spotlight is indexing something in the background. You've checked everything. We've gone through all these different tutorials already. You've done all of that and it's still not working correctly. It could be because spotlight is doing something in the background. It's thinking about something is doing some processing, is doing some searching array indexing something in the background that is causing your overall Mac to run slightly slower than it should be. So if that was to happen, I would say, look, let's just cancel the spotlight search. Let's remove spotlight from indexing, re-add it back in, re-index everything from scratch. Because a very, very important. So to re-index spotlight here now Mac, we need to go into System Preferences. I've got here in my doc. Otherwise you can access this by going to the Apple logo on the top left-hand corner, selecting system preferences right here. You're going to get all your System Preferences listed, which are all of your applications, all of your backend system settings that you can go and customize. And we have looked at a few of the items in here already in previous videos. If you haven't checked those out yet, spotlight is what we're looking for right here. We're going to select Spotlight. Here's a few things. There's some crazy stuff that you can do right from here. So Spotlight helps you quickly find things on your computer and show suggestions from the Internet Music App Store, movie showtimes, locations nearby and more. And then it says right here that under search results only selected categories will appear in a spotlight result. So right away, you've got the opportunity to give spotlight a bit of a break, right? If you don't want spotlight to search for certain things or have certain things be searchable. You can untick those options from here. All right, So for example, funds, Right? You speak English, you're watching this video, you're speaking English. Do you really want to be able to search all the other funds? Might be not, so we can untick that. Okay. Are there any is there anything else, you know, do we want Siri Suggestions that that's sort of good. What else could we remained? Maybe contexts, maybe you don't want your contexts to show up in your spotlight search. So already what this has done is your limiting and the search capabilities of spotlight. But you'll be more specific as to what exactly can search. So you are gonna get slightly better performance out of Spotlight searches as a result. But that's not the end solution. All right, we're just going to take these back on because we're going to leave all these on. We're going to click on privacy over here. So what this says, he's prevents spotlight from searching these locations. So at the moment, there's nothing in here. So for example, you've attached a external hard drive or USB hard drive. That is big, very big. Let's say it's all of your photos collection. You've got thousands and thousands of firearms and you are not interested in having those spotlight as far as being visible within Spotlight. So let's say you have a hard drive and you've got a four terabyte hydro, which is what I've got right here. And it contains all of your photos. Perhaps you don't want your photos to be part of the spotlight search because it's just going to take a long time and you're not interested in going to spotlight and typing in a photo name for it coming up. So all you would do is you'd grab this hard drive, right? I've got it right here. I'll drag it in or I can click on the Plus. I can also click on the Plus. What if you have a folder, you've got a folder with a whole bunch of stuff. You don't want that folder to be searchable within Spotlight. Click on Plus or I could drag it in. And I could then say it will look my downloads folder, I will add that one in. So I don't want downloads and I don't want media for TB to be searchable within Spotlight. So when I search for something in spotlight, anything that is contained in those two folders will not even show up. You may see where this is heading. Let's just remove these. What we wanna do to re-index spotlight, little bit of a trick. Here's your hard drive. This is your main hard drive, Macintosh HD. Okay, we want to drag that into here. Now if you don't have it listed, you can always click on the Plus you might have in hearing you find up Macintosh hard drive, choose. Okay. It's not giving me a warning. I you show you want to prevent spotlight from searching in Macintosh HD. If you exclude this location from Spotlight searches, the search feature work in some applications, what you're doing is you're telling your Mac, you're telling spotlight. Do not search anything on my harddrive, nothing. So what you're doing is you're essentially turning off the spotlight, indexing against your hard-drive, right? That's the first step. So we're going to say, Okay, we've now added the Macintosh hard drive into there. Once it's in there, it's no longer searching. What I can then do is I can select the hard drive again and site remove. So your spotlight is now going to go and re-index your entire computer from scratch. It's going to go and scan everything again. And then hopefully at the end of that, you'll spotlight is running much better and you'll Mac is running bed up because it's normal indexing taking place. They won't know is that while this is taking place, because we've just said re-index spotlight from scratch. It's possibly going to take a fair bit of time to re-index, right? The more data you've got on your computer. If you've got terabytes of data, and it's going to take a considerable amount of time to re-index. So what I would recommend is do this before you go to bed, Just before you go to bed at the hard drive in there, give it a bit of time, remove the hard drive, go to bed and it could take a few hours. It will re-index everything and then in the morning, you'll be good. And then your spotlight will be completely re-index and then hopefully you're getting a little bit of better performance. All right, so that is spotlight. So right now, if I go and search for something, not really searching for anything, I can't really fine too much stuff. There's not, it's indexing as you can see. And all its fan is just some suggestions around some URLs. It's found something that seems to be YouTube record IDs in my notes, but that's it. It hasn't actually Fen anything else because it's currently indexing that it will take a little bit of time. But then once it's done, tests will be able to find a whole bunch of stuff. So that's the end of this tutorial on how to get spotlight working bet up by re-index, sing it.
8. Browser Maintenance: The next session, we are going to be now focusing on the Internet browser. You're on a Mac, you're running Mac OS, whatever version you may have running. And you've got a browser of some sort. You've got the big ones being Google crime. He got Safari, firefox, or others. Over time. As you use your browser, as you're going and surfing websites as you're downloading stuff, the browser can get clogged up. Or you got your browsing history, you'll show your cash. But all of the stuff that he's starting to just accumulate on the Browse up. And unless you go in and clean up that browser, your browser could start to run slower and slower. It may not be necessarily that your internet is running slow and maybe she's the browser, which is essentially the gateway from your computer into the Internet, could be the cause. A pod from that. Over time, you may find that sometimes your browser will get what's called extensions added into it. What are these extensions? Well, you may visit a website and it may say, Would you like to install this extension on your browser? And these are essentially little applications that embed themselves into a browser to sometimes make things easier. Sometimes I do makes it make things easy, but other times they could severely slow down your brows up. So we're gonna look at two of the primary browsers, which I would primarily use, Safari and Google Chrome. Firefox is very similar. We won't cover it in this particular training videos, so we're just going to be focusing on those other two. We're going to show you how to go and clean up your browser and make sure that it's kept clean for long-terms. Automatically can clean up or you can do it manually. And then also how to review all of the extensions that are installed into your browsers, and how to select which ones you do want to keep and which ones you don't want to keep. Some of them could be spam, so you want to remove those. So here I've got crime. This is the first browser that we're going to be using. Now right from here, I can go and search for something. I can go and look for digital but computing, which is my YouTube channel. There we go, looks really cool. And I can now go into Chrome Preferences and see a few things in here. Okay, So under the Settings area, There's a whole bunch of stuff, right? You can go here and really customize your entire Chrome experience. You can sync it with other Google devices. You can change the name, the picture. You can do it at your bookmarks or I filled and then there's one he called safety check, which I'll like to do from time to time. So crime can help you keep safe from data breaches, bad extensions, and more. So what this can do is this is more related around security and just good practice around making sure that your Chrome is safe and that extinctions do not install themselves that are potentially malicious, right? You can click on this check Now button. I generally would do this from time to time. It's quite good. Click on Check now, and it's just running a little bit of a scan against my browser. So the scan is complete. You'll see that it has actually found an update from my Google Chrome, which is nice so you can go ahead and reload your clothes out of Google Chrome, re-open it with a new version. It's always good practice to run a new version of a browser because new versions of the browser come with it. A whole heap of not only new features which may make your browsing experience better, but also come with a lot of fixes to vulnerabilities, to maybe security issues on your browser that had been discovered. So you wanna make sure you're running a new version to make sure that it is secure and that nobody can essentially infiltrate the data that's within your Google Chrome or your internet session. You'll see it's also shown here. The Password Safe Browsing extensions are all okay. So I don't have to worry about that. Sometimes if you've got some browser history, you've got some bookmarks. Some of those websites, for example, could be compromised or may have been involved in some sort of a data breach or something like that in the past. These can tell you whether that website has been involved in a data breach or there's other vulnerability somewhere on your browser, and it will tell you, so it's actually quite helpful. The next second he's about privacy and security. Cli, browser data, cookies and other side data security site settings. We're focusing here on a couple of these. First being cleaved browser data to clearing the history, the cookies, the cache, and more. Let's click on the little arrow to the right heat for there were two sections up here. You've got basic or advanced. Okay. We like advance, just gives you a few more things, a few more options available. And here are all the options available to you about clear browsing data, browsing history, download history, cookies, cached images and files, passwords and other sign-in data your browser. We'll run slow. If this isn't maintaining kept clean at the study, It will be okay. But then over time, as the sac collect more and more and more of a role, it will start to have a performance issue. So go into heat and CLIA, your data, clearing your direct Clay's out, everything that's in heat. And it just makes things run a little bit better off. It will require you to close out of your browser and reopen it. Now the other thing as well that's quite helpful, is under time range, you can tell it how much history do you want it to clear out last ala last 24 hours, seven days for weeks or all time. My general recommendation is clicking on all time. All time will ensure that everything is clean. And then the next time when you login, it will be a fresh experience on your browser. Something you need to be aware of is this last one, for example, which can get a little bit annoying. Passwords and other signing data. So for example, if you go into a website and you don't have to type in your username and password. It automatically pre-populates that, which can be helpful, but at the same time can be a little bit a security issue by you doing that. So I again recommend not to save your passwords, but let's say you do. Clearing this will clear all of that. So if you go and visit I've got Amazon.com, he you go and visit that Amazon.com website. You'll use them and password will no longer be there, but you'll have to retype those in so you won't be able to remember those passwords. So just remember that before you do go and do that, if you're happy with that, we click on clean data extinctions. Let's look at that. Here are a whole bunch of extensions. These are essentially add-on applications to make my browsing experience easier, Give me for the functionality. Sometimes these extensions are really good. Other times they're not. Other times they actually make calls your browser to run slowly. I'm at times you may not even know what these extensions are going into. Your extensions. Review all the extensions you have installed. All right. So a very good indication that you have some extensions is you'll see that right here on the top right-hand corner. I've gotten these little icons. Okay. These are extensions. If you have a lot, you've potentially got a lot of extensions. Hopefully you know what I will do. The more you've got, the slow at run. The other thing is sometimes extensions are accessing data straight from your browser, history, browsing data, things of that nature off. So just be aware of that in case you don't want your browsing data to be exposed to particular extensions. Use them. So look at your extensions in heat and ether applications in here that you don't want to be used, extensions that you don't want to be used, remove them. You can see a little bit more information about each of these by clicking on details and then remove if you're not happy that he's a good one, Keywords Everywhere, I don't use this one, so I'm going to select Remove. Okay. You can report abuse. So in the event it is spam, you don't know how we got date installed itself. You can click on repetitive use and then it'll essentially will elicit the powers that be out in Google, in the Google Chrome oil that this extension is there. Go and investigate and talk to these people who are doing stuff they shouldn't be. We're going to say remove. That extension is now removed. Great, looks, all good. Let's look at Safari very quickly. This is the default browser that's installed on every Mac and the settings are really the same under Safari at the top, right down to Preferences. And you're presented with some windows right here. Okay, similar to Google Chrome or Safari, you can click on Clear History. Okay? Clear History will remove related cookies and other website data last hour today, today and yesterday or all history, we're going to select all history and clear history. Okay, good. But we can also go into preferences and writing. He we can select a couple things, remove history items after one day, after one week, manually, after one year. This will do it automatically. So in the event that you don't have to manually go into Safari and CLIA browser history. You can actually set safari to automatically go and clear your history automatically after this particular period. If it's set to manually, it will not do it automatically at all. I like to just getting into a good habit of making making sure that my history is always clean clean up. So you could do it after one day. So automatically after one day it will go and remove history items, removed, downloaded list items is another good one. When you download things, they download potentially into your downloads folder or into your desktop. But then also they have a little section that is saved within Safari with the history. So when Safari quits after one day upon successful download or manually, okay, So automatically clear at the list of downloaded items when Safari quit so we can leave it as that. So every time I close out as Safari, that list of downloaded items automatically gets removed. What about extension? So right from here on the very top right, we've got extensions listed right here. And here, all the extensions installed, in my case, safari does not have any. That's great. Very similar to what we looked at Google Chrome. If you have extensions in HE verify that you know what they are. If you know what they are and you're happy to keep using them, keep them in there. If you don't know what they are, you don't need them, go and remove them. So we've looked at Chrome, we've looked at Safari. You can look at other browsers, very, very similar in Firefox or other browsers. So we've looked at how to clean up all of your browser history, your cash, your website data, your download list. And we've also looked at the extensions on both of these browsers, making sure that all the extensions valid remove the ones that you don't actually need. And this will help your browser experience to be a little bit better, a little bit faster, and a little bit more secure. That's it for this video. Thanks for watching this session.
9. New User Profile: Let's go over the next recommendation in speeding up your Mac, Mac OS. This is to look at creating a new user profile. So what do I mean by this? Well, you've tried all of these previous steps. You've reviewed all the previous videos, and it's, you've seen some improvement, but it hasn't been dramatic. It's still running slow, it's still a little bit baggy. There could be some issues still somewhat on your Mac. Now the problem could actually be your user profile itself. So you will load dean, he in my case, I'm logged in to my username called Emilia. And it could be that that is just become very, very corrupted over several years of me having, for example, that profile or even a few months, whatever it may be. So the next step is then to, let's forget about that current user profile, that current Emilio username, and create a brand new one and then copy some data over. So right here or not mech, we're going to open up a system preferences. So this is accessible via my system preferences in my doc right here. Or you can access it by going to the top-left to the Apple logo and selecting system preferences within C sub purposes, as you know, this contains all of the information relevant to setting up some system edits and preferences across your Mac. We're going to select here uses and groups. Ok. Now in here you'll see that I have got one single use up. All right, this is just the Emilia user. This user is an administrator as an admin. You may have multiple other uses. So in the case that all of your users are running slow, perhaps you could look at updating and creating new ones for all. But for this demo, all we're going to be doing is showing you the creation of one new user profile. So this is assuming that this is the profile that is causing you issues. And we now want to go and create a brand new one. Now the first thing we need to do is lock to make changes so I wouldn't unlock it. So it because we can't actually access some of the changes in HE unless we unlock it. So once you've entered in your username and password, it will then unlock. And now we presented without Emilia login, okay? Now what we wanna do is we're going to click on this little plus logo right here. And we're going to create a brand new account. So this is an account that he's going to be created essentially from scratch. And then we can need to copy all of the data over any data that you want to keep. Now remembering that this is a brand new profile, okay? Which means that all of your settings, any settings that you may have set up on your Emilio peripheral or on your profile will not be in this new profile that we are creating. Applications will still be available, but things like your dog, your desktop, all of the files within your documents, your movies that will all be gone. They weren't baby, they're still going to be in the original profile. So this is going to be fresh, brand new, so that you ensure that all of if there's anything that's wrong in your old profile, that all of that is now left in that all profile. And then this one is brand new, fresh without any of those bugs that may have been in your old profile. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a new account and we're going to give it a administrator rights. Of course, this is only if your current account isn't administrator. It's a standard account. You create one that he's a standard account. But for us we're going to create an administrator. And just for this video, we're going to call it Emilio to. Okay? And we're gonna give it a simple password. And it's always helpful to put in a password hints my password. Okay, So Emilia to and create user. So here it is. A brand new profile has now been created. You'll see that I can't access a few additional features here. It's because we haven't logged in yet. So what we're going to need to do to now need to log out or switch use up from your Emilio admin, right from this current user, from your current profile, and then login to Emilia T2. Now what we'll do is before we do that, if we open up our finder and we scroll down to our hard drive, it, hey, you've got a free fall is your applications, your library, your system, and your uses. You'll see that even here, I've now got two profiles other than shed, which is always available. Emilia Bay, my original my current profile that I'm logged in on here, and Emilio to being a brand new user profile. So what you'll need to do is once you've logged into Emilia too, if you want to copy any falls over, you need a copy them from Emilia to Emilio to now there are ways to do this by actually changing the permissions, because you'll see that right now in Emilio to everything is got a little red indicator against it. That means that this profile, Emilio, even though it's an administrator, doesn't have full administrator rights on Emilio too. So I can actually go and open up any of these folders because they are locked. We're going to use this shared folder right here. This is a photo that is open to any profile that he's on your Mac. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create a folder here called files to move over. Okay. We'll give it a little under scope so that it goes all the way up to the top. And in here, I'm going to now copy the files or move the files. It's up to you that we want to be transferring from my current profile over to ameliorate to okay. So just for the purpose of this tutorial, let's just go into our desktop right here. And I've got these alias Friday, and we'll just go into do a copy of this. And then on the shared, I'm going to paste it in here. Okay? So now there is a copy of that fall under here. And then I know that when a login to Emilia to navigate to share, and that's where the follow bay under file to move over. So the next step is now to go and login to Emilio to in the top right-hand corner of where the little icon here. And I'm going to choose now select Emilio to write from him. So thrown into that password for Emilio to, for this new profile, the very first time you do login, it will take a little bit longer than usual because it's just getting things ready. It's just setting up some stuff in the background and getting that profile, that desktop and everything else ready for you. So we're now logged into this brand new profile. You would of course need to go and configure it. It's going to pop up with a number of different options that you'll need to set at that time, including some privacy, your fingerprint, Siri, and a few other things like that. But then once you've done that, then log you into a brand new profile, completely fresh and none of the old stuff from your old profile will be present here. And a guarantee that this will be running faster. The profile will always run faster at the very first time when you start to use it because there's nothing in it yet. As you start to create and add new things into your profile, it will start to run slow off, so just be aware of that. But now that you can see the speed, you can take advantage of that and then just be mindful of what you're actually adding into your profile. Now my computer will look slightly different. My find it looks completely different, so the harddrive isn't even listed in here. I've just got my four terabyte external hard drive on my desktop and nothing else. If I need to access that hard drive, I can go into guard. And then in here, you've got a whole bunch of things including computer. That's it right there. Here's the hard drive. I can just change this view. So those files that we now move Dava are available and the shared files to move over and he, they are, there's the one individual tasks list. And the good thing is because this is an administrator account and the permissions have gone through, your old profile may be accessible to you. In my case, you see that right here, I can actually go into the desktop and here are all my file. So I can actually go and copy and paste the files that I need to, from my old profile to my new profile. Okay, so that is this step on how to create a new profile. Again, remembering that this is not going to carry any of your settings I have up, so you'll have to manually copy files and folders I've up. And then if you have applications that you're using in your old profile, you need to re-open them and then reconfigure them. They could be the way that they look, the look and feel of the way that apps work. Saved passwords, your browser history will all be CLIA, it'll all be a brand. It's it's almost as if you have a brand new computer setup.
10. PRAM and SMC Resets: Alright, in this video, we're going to be focusing on race sitting a couple of coal functions on your Mac. We've done all the software, we've done an element of hardware. Now we're looking at race setting more of the system configuration back-end things on your Mac to see whether that fixes some things to things that we're going to look at today is the P Ram and the SMC. These are two different sorts of commands that you can run onto your Mac. Turning it off, turning it on, holding a particular keyboard function, multiple keys together, and then it will go and reset these two things, the PA RAM and the SMC. So these are good for a few things. Not only could it improve your performance of your Mac slightly, but they're good to run if your Mac is just acting a little bit strangely, things are not working as well. Things could be, as I said, slow, but perhaps drives are not showing up correctly. You could be having Bluetooth issues and audio problem, a weed graphics thing with your screen. There's a number of things that could be happening that it just odd. And what you can do to troubleshoot it is racists, these particular things on your Mac and then see whether that problem continues after that. If you're on a MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, one of the laptops, common things that could be fixed by doing a p.sit RAM or a SMC reset are, for example, the fan, he's just going crazy on your Mac. It just runs really, really fast all the time and very rarely goes down. Perhaps your battery is reporting and correctly it says that it is at a 100 percent, then you unplug it and then it doesn't actually run it a 100 percent or it's saying that is 20 percent full but then you get a full days out of it. It could be anomalies there, so it's just reporting things incorrectly. They don't wanna do this too often either. So let's look at the PE RAM first. First thing is I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you really need to, unless things are running a bit odd, unless you having some strange glitches, performance issues, things that slow and you don't understand why they slow, only run it then don't run this consistently. My recommendation is I would not race it my P Ram more than once, if not twice per year. Or I'll just do it only just to give my Mac there's a little bit of a reset, clean up any bugs that could be happening in the background, and then I will not touch it again for six to 12 months. So to reset the PRM, what you're going to need to do is you need to shut down your computer. So if you're watching this on the computer that you need to do this reset on. Take note of this, and then you'll have to do it on that computer afterwards. But essentially you shut down your machine, your laptop, your desktop completely shut it down. Then you press the power button. You press the power button, and then you're going to hold a few commands on your keyboard. Commands are right here. It is Command Option P or Command Option PR. So you hold down the power button and then hold down Command Option PR at the same time. And make sure that you continue to hold those keys until the gray screen comes up or it might not work. Okay. You need to hold them down enough time for the Mac to then reboot again. You may or may not hear a startup time. Sometimes it does come up, sometimes it doesn't. And then you let go of the keys and then the Mac will reboot again. So if it didn't work for whatever reason, try it again. Shutting down your back completely, completely turned off Power add-on, holding down the Command Option PR, keep holding those keys until the gray screen comes up. It might not work. If it doesn't come up, then you hold down the keys until the macro reboots again. You then here another chime come up and then you let go of the keys and then your Mac should then reboot and start up. And that means that that P Ram has now been reset and hopefully the Mac bugs, glitches, perhaps performance issues have been resolved. Now some things may be reset when you do login, it may look slightly different. Like for example, the mouse spade may be different or the time date has changed. It's because he just reset some back-end system settings. So you just go and change those if you need to. Other times you'll go in and it will be completely fine and nothing, you wouldn't even notice it. The next one is the SMC. So we just did pay RAM. The next one is the SMC. So essentially the SMC, very similar to the PRM managers and controls a lot of the backend functionality of your Mac, so your fans, your lives, the power and other things like that. So again, only do the SMC if you really need to if you're seeing strange glitches, I generally would recent both the PE ran and the SMC at the same time to do the pay RAM first, then do the SMC just as a good practice doing both. And I only need to do them once if not twice per year. Now the command for the SMC can be different depending on the computer. In the case of most modern computers, what you can do is you can go shut down the Mac completely and then press and hold the power button down for 10 seconds. Okay, so count to 10 and then release the power button. And then wait a few seconds and then press the power button undertone your Mac. Okay, that's sort of the first thing that you could do. If after that there's still some bugs. That's almost like a first step of SMC. Then what you can do is you shut down the Mac again, okay, and then on your keyboard, you're going to press three commands through three buttons. You're going to hold the Control key or the Option key, which is Alt or the Option key, Control Option, and Shift, Control Option and Shift, hold those three down. And then power on your Mac and hold those down. While the Mac is named powered on whole dose for at least another 10 seconds and then release them. All right, wait a few seconds and then press the power button on to turn on your Mac. So that command will generally work for most modern Macs. If you do have a mac daddy site earlier than 2009, the step is slightly different because you'll have to remove the battery and things like that if especially if you have a laptop that is removable battery. So we're gonna go with the assumption that you're watching this with a fairly new Mac that's 2010, less than 10 years old. Okay, So we're gonna do that command SMC, holding down the power button, There's the first step white, and then power it on again after 15 seconds or so. Or then the second option being holding it down and then doing a shift Control Option powered on holding it down altogether and then releasing and then powering it on again. And that should then reset that SMC. So that is the reset of the SMC and the pyramid and the order doesn't matter. I find that sometimes pay RAM first and then SMC works better if you're still having a bug after that, try it again or then even try it one more time. But I wouldn't repeat this process too often. Again, once if not twice per year. And that's the end of this tutorial.
11. HDD + RAM: In this video, we are not going to be looking at the software side of things. So all of the videos before this have all focused on what you can do on the macOS software to improve it. Some of the stuff may have helped you by clearing out some cash and doing some first-aid create a new profile. But if after all of that, you're still having some performance issues on your Mac and it's still running a little bit slow and you want it to go quicker. There's a couple of things that you can do. These though, will involve reviewing the hardware on your computer, the actual bits inside of your computer, whether it be a laptop or a desktop and iMac or MacBook Pro, whatever. The parts inside. All right, so you've gotta CPE, you've got RAM, you've got hard, you got graphics cards, you go to all of these components inside of your Mac. Sometimes you may need to upgrade some of those. What can happen over time is you could be maintaining your Mac really, really well. But every time Apple releases a brand new Mac OS version, all right, they release a brand new update. That update requires more resources, requires more RAM, the requires better graphics only sort of stuff in the background. So your Mac is a bit more busy. So the resources in your Mac I go into now be allocated a little bit more on the operating system towards macOS than they were in the previous MacOS. So sometimes you can't get away with that unless you do not upgrade. If you don't upgrade your Mac at all, then you're generally good to go if you're maintaining things. But then it's like a, it's like a snowball effect, right? You have to upgrade the macOS to get old and new features, but then your Mac is going to start to have a performance it as a result, with a new macOS comes all of the applications you have on your computer, for example, Dropbox, right? You've got Safari, you've got all of these applications. There are new versions of these that need to be compatible with the new version of the Mac OS, which means that these new versions are also going to be bigger. Perhaps they look better, There's better graphics on those, on those versions of these applications requiring potentially more resources. So we've looked at software, now, we're looking at hardware. Now the two primary things that we said before, our RAM and hard drive, the CPU commonly cannot be upgraded on a Mac unfortunately, but you can get yourself more RAM and potentially look at changing your hard drive. Let's look at 3AM first. The first thing you need to do is look at how much RAM you've got onto your computer. You've got your Mac ride. He, you need to now go and investigate how much RAM you actually have. The easiest place to do this is by going into your apple logo on the very top left hand corner and clicking on about this Mac, this brings up some information about your Mac, including the operating system that is currently running. You'll see that a MacBook Pro, 13 inch right here. And that it has a processor of 2.4 gigahertz quad-core, and it has 16 gig of RAM. The right from there you can see that 16 gig of RAM is what has been allocated on this Mac. Now I don't know whether this Mac has two slots for RAM, three slots for slots, one slot for RAM. I didn't know if this Mac has two slots. Are they to eight gig slots or is it 1, 16 gigs of RAM, right? Most Macs can be upgraded with the RAM unless you've gone and bought your Apple Mac fully spec'd out with the highest amount of RAM, there is a good chance that you can get more RAM installed into your Mac to see more information. What did we click on? System Report. So once system report opens up, you've got a whole bunch of information that is generally not available to the end-user unless you know where to find it. This has detailed information about every component on your Mac. So this being a MacBook Pro, It's got all this information around, really everything to do with my Mac and I can easily see how it's being built, all the specs, et cetera, et cetera. So right here I can see on the hardware of selected memory, which is my RAM. And I can see that I have two slots. So inside on MacBook Pro, there are two slots available for RAM, and these are eight gig each. So I've actually got two slots of eight gig each, which makes it 16 gig. So right from there, I know just because I'm an IT person, I know that I can actually upgrade that to more RAM. I can potentially get somebody to take out those eight gig sticks from my computer and upgrade them to, to 16 gig sticks, essentially making my RAM 32 gig really doubling it from what I've got right now. And just by improving the RAM and increasing the RAM, you're going to get a significant performance boost. Your Mac will start to run faster because of the RAM now commonly depends on the Mac. Most Macs are not accessible for the user to upgrade the random selves. Sudden early values of Mac, you could do that. But what I would recommend is just to be safe, I would take your Mac down to an Apple store. Once you book in your Mac with an Apple store. Actually see VIII of serial number, the amount of RAM you've got in there. And there'll be able to tell you whether your Mac can get additional RAM. It will cost you a little bit to obviously get more RAM, but you will see a significant performance boost just from that. Okay? So right here I can see that I can get more, but I would double-check with an apple genius perhaps at an Apple Store. And they can actually tell you that yes, you can get more RAM. And this is how much it will cost. You will have to leave the Mac with them likely, and they can actually do that for you. Apart from that, the other thing that you can do is not only RAM but hard drive. We talked about earlier around a SATA hard drive and an SSD. So in an earlier video, we covered the differences between the two. But a SATA hard drive, which generally an oldest sort of hard drive that has a moving needle across the disk is slower than an SSD harddrive which has got no moving parts. It's a solid state flash-based disc and it's considerably faster. Sata hard drive. If you have an old SATA hard drive, then upgrading to a SSD will give you a significant performance increase because the disks will be able to read data and write data a lot faster between data. Or if you're moving data from here to here, from one folder to another, it would just be faster because it's going to be on an SSD. And in here you got a tab called storage. I've got my primary hard drive, which is my Macintosh HD. And then I've also got my media four terabytes, which is my external USB drive, okay, right here I can see that this is flash storage, that is an SSD. So right from here I know that my hard-drive is flash and it's not gonna be any faster, right? So I'm going to get any faster. Not, not now anyway, with the current technology, you can see the hard-drive space as well. So if you do need more space, That's a good indication to let you know what your capacities of your hard-drive. But it also will tell you whether you have a flash-based SSD or not. If you don't have one, consider getting yourself a flash-based SSD very similar to the RAM. The best thing to do is take it down to an Apple store, get them to actually go and upgrade your RAM from your current all the hard drive to an SSD. What they're going to tell you that is to make sure that you backup all of your Mac beforehand. So before you change any hard drives, you want to ensure that you've got, you've got a full backup of everything. The great thing about the MAC is that it has some software built-in called Time Machine. You can run time machine, back it up to an external USB hard drives. So if you have a USB hard drive at home, plug it in. Time Machine working. We're not going to talk about that in this course. I will have another course that talks about the backups for a Mac. But back it up first, make sure that it's fully backed up before you do take it to an Apple store and get them to then upgrade to a flash-based disk. Because it is a brand new hard drive. There'll be nothing on it. Just be aware of that it's going to be a fresh installation of macOS on there. And then you gonna have to transfer all your data back off your time machine backup onto your Mac. That includes all your profiles and all of your applications. And that's the end of this particular tutorial video.
12. Your Turn - Summary: So that is the end of this class. Hopefully, you followed along and if you didn't, I would not recommend that you go back and just go through each of these tips that I gave you to improve the performance and optimize your Mac go and do it yourself, get your Mac login, and then action each of these to actually get better performance out of your Mac. I would also love it if you let me know how you went. So my little recommendation for you is go and do it and then let me know whether it was successful, whether your Mac is now running better as a result of some of these tips. So thank you so much. That is the end of this class. Hopefully you did find it helpful, as I said, do let me know if you did, let me know if you have any questions, any concerns, but also to share this with other people who you know that will also find this helpful. I've also got a whole bunch of other classes available that I'm sure you will also find helpful. Thanks again. We'll talk to you next time.
Emilio Aguero, ...all things tech
