Well, it’s that time of year again. Spring is here! Most of us have some sort of spring cleaning habits, cleaning up the yard that’s been covered in snow for a season, getting into some of the nooks and crannies that the winter weather had us deterred from getting to. House and home isn’t the only thing to focus on though, our Macs should also get a good cleaning. In this blog I’ll give you some tips to help manage the process from inside-out. From organizing your cluttered desktop to disinfecting your keyboard, here are 5 things we should all be doing for our Mac computers this spring!
-Optimize Storage
Since the release of MacOS Sierra (10.12), there have been many feature changes to help increase productivity. Sometimes we find that our productivity and processing speed is brought down after putting in enough work and clogging up our disk space. There is a handy tool built into our Mac computers you may not know about called “Optimize Storage”. Optimize storage lets you set up your Mac to automatically purge any movies or tv shows in iTunes when you’ve watched them, and allows you to only download recent email attachments. This really helps create more space if you’re an individual who receives a lot of documents and files via email. You can find optimize storage by going to the top left corner of your desktop and clicking on the Apple logo. Then pick “About this Mac” and a window will pop up that tells you everything about your Mac. In that window click on “Storage” and you will see all of your data currently on your computer organized in nice colour coded segments. Click “Manage” next to that bar and you’ll have a few different options to help keep up with the clutter, one of which being Optimize Storage! Read into them all and follow the instructions it provides you, every tool in this window is helpful!
-Organize your Desktop
It’s really easy to download or put things on your desktop for easy access, although after a while it just becomes too much making it hard to find anything. Cluttering up your desktop can also slow down your boot time, as your computer has to process all of your saved data on the desktop while it opens. Cleaning up your desktop and minimizing what’s on there can give you a boot speed increase! You can view everything on your desktop in your Finder application that should be at the bottom left of your dock, desktop should be one of your folders in there. View everything in that desktop folder and start organizing or dragging and dropping into folders that those files would belong to. It’s a little tedious, but the organization will greatly help increase your productivity throughout the year.
-Get Rid of Unnecessary Disk Images
Whenever we download a big application, a “Disk Image” is used to actually initiate the installation of that application on your computer. Once that application is installed though, the disk image really is no longer needed, it has served its purpose. Any and all disk images you have my not be taking up a ton of space, but they don’t need to be there anymore. If you go to your finder application and search “disk image” and highlight the “kind” categorization, you should all your disk images pop up in a list. Get rid of ‘em!
-Minimize applications launching at start up
You may notice by the end of the winter, whenever you boot up your computer you find yourself sitting there twiddling thumbs for a few minutes while it boots, sometimes even longer! One of the things that could be causing your boot time to slow down is the amount of Apps ou have launching right at start up. The easiest way to stop these application from auto-launching is right from the dock. Right-click the application and hover over options in the menu. You should see “open at login” with a check mark next to it. Click on that, and the check mark should disappear, leaving that application to be manually opened whenever you need it.
-BACK-IT-UP
This is the most important part of your spring cleaning, Backing-up your computer. You’ve done all this tedious work to organize your Mac, this is how you save your work and make sure it’s protected. I could probably write another blog entirely about the importance of this task. You NEED to have a copy of your data somewhere, just in case anything happens. If you haven’t had a back-up of your computer done, get out there, get an external drive, plug that thing in and let the “Time Machine” application do that work for you. It’s very easy and just takes a bit more of your time and once you have it started, you can leave it for a while and get a good deserved break from all of you Mac spring cleaning tasks. If you need any assistance with this task, contact us. We at Mac Outpost are always more than happy to help keep great habits.
Well, those are the clean up tasks I recommend. While your at it, give your keyboard a good disinfecting and maybe change up your wallpaper to help breath some more fresh air into your mac. That’ll be it for this blog, I hope any and all of this has been helpful!
Happy Tidying,
Quinton Maxfield – Sales Representative/Administrative Assistant
