There was a time when owners of Apple computing devices did not have to bother with tuning up or optimizing their operating systems. Apple used to put its operating systems on chips instead of on hard disks, but that was a long time ago. These days, only certain iOS products such as the iPhone and the iPad feature this computing architecture; machines powered by Mac OS X are essentially devices that rely on disk-based operating systems.

Maintaining Your Apple Computing Product

If you own a Mac or MacBook, you essentially own a computing device built on the Intel x86 architecture that powers Windows machines. This means that your version of OS X resides on the hard drive, which could affect the performance of your device over time as it handles more files. As the drive gets filled with data, your Mac or MacBook will begin to run slower. You will notice this when booting your device; you may have inadvertently installed more startup items than your Mac or MacBook can handle.

[su_note note_color=”#F4f4f4″]When a hard drive gets too full, your Apple device may not be able to perform its automatic hard drive defragmentation; some applications may stop working altogether due to memory shortages.[/su_note]

Improving the performance of your Mac or MacBook is a matter of tuning up the hard drive and modifying OS X settings for maximum efficiency. When you bring your OS X device to A Plus Computers for a tune-up, here are some of the things that our technicians will look for:

• DNS Prefetching: This feature allows the Safari browser to operate faster by evaluating links on a page, saving them in the background and loading pages in the background. With the improved broadband connections and advanced DNS server technology in use these days, the DNS prefect file could be cleared and the feature turned off.
• Desktop Widgets: If you have been upgrading OS X on the same device for years, you have probably installed quite a few desktop widgets. Depending on the age of your Mac or MacBook, our technicians may recommend turning off the Apple Dashboard and all widgets.
• RAM Monitoring: When tuning up your Apple device, our technicians will look at the Activity Monitor and determine the items that may be triggering CPU cycles and consuming memory. Some login items can be disabled to improve performance.
• Disk Directory and Memory Caches: These two OS X features can accumulate indexing errors and too many items over the years. Our technicians will run tools to detect and remove these errors.