Reboot. As simple as it may sound, rebooting reinitialises everything and makes you restart from a clean slate. (Doesn’t count as a way to speed up).

1. Repair Disk Permissions. Go into Applications > Utilities > and start Disk Utility. Select your hard drive and click on Repair Disk Permissions. Apparently applications you install or run often mingle with what the OS expects as the right permissions for certain key files. Whatever.

2. Unclutter your desktop. Bad habits have a way of appearing as the natural thing to do. Computer architects are often caught up in a logic of their own (less at Apple’s) that makes no provision for the “natural way” of doing things. Isn’t it easy to just save everything to the Desktop and then just link to it say when you’re adding an attachment to an email? Well don’t. Leopard has addressed this by saving in a download folder right off Safari. Spotlight, QuickSilver and others are there to allow you to be sloppy with your files thanks to meta data describing their contents. Move everything out of your Desktop, leave it at your user level (so you don’t have to worry about “Sharing”). The Desktop makes preview items for all these icons lying around. It takes unnecessary time to process, especially at boot up.

3. Remove unnecessary start-up items. Go into System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and make sure you understand what is there and for what purpose. Obviously, if you don’t need it, simply remove it.

4. Clean your hard drive. Make sure you have at least 15% of free space on your hard drive. Find files that appear in more than one place, use whatsize to determine where your bigger files are (or use OmniDiskSweeper). Run Xslimmer if you have an Intel machine and couldn’t careless about PowerPC legacy code in Universal Binary applications. Please note that once you do that, your application will only run on an Intel machine. Consider getting an extra drive for data and backups (and for Time Machine). Run AppFresh, stay current and get rid of unused applications. Clear caches. Be careful and use a utility like Yasu. Accept the defaults, don’t over do it. USER and SYSTEM caches are best kept untouched.

5. Add more RAM. Nothing like maxing out your ram and lowering the slower disk access for memory intensive applications or for running multiple applications at once. Crucial and Kingston are probably the two most popular suppliers offering extensive support for finding out what memory chip will fit your Mac. Crucial has a memory scanner that you can download and install on your Mac. Kingston wants you to tell it what computer you have. About this Mac > More Info > Hardware > Memory will reveal the banks of memory your system has and how they are populated at present. Desktop Macs are pretty easy to upgrade. Laptops are another story and involve removing the battery in most cases. Here’s a good chart for the iMacs. Here is a chart for the PowerBooks and the iBooks. Here the memory chart for the Power Macs Finally here is how to change memory on your MacBook.

5 ½. Run Activity Monitor. Find out who’s on first with this admin graphic interface. Go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor. It will show you how the CPU is running, how saturated your memory is and use it to check out on the processes running in your system. Google is your friend for any strange sounding process. I include this as a speed gainer because it is the best way to troubleshoot an “intuition” or a “feeling” about your computer’s perceived lack of speed.