This month Bradley will demonstrate his process by way of example, of cleaning out a Mac so it can run faster, more like when it was new. We all have this problem to some extent, we’ve updated the operating system and the application, tried out a few things that seemed useful but never spent any time throwing out the old stuff. It takes time and you have to make decisions about what you might need.

Sure, if we had the money, the time and the space, we’d have a top-of-the-line MacPro with a pair of 30-inch monitors with terabytes of disk space and gigabytes of RAM. But we don’t, (well I'm pretty close) so let’s make the most of our current Mac. If we still could run the kinds of simple software we had years ago, it would run super fast on a modern Mac, but we push our old Mac with newer software and we’re not about to go backwards. Who says Microsoft Word 5.1 would even work anymore?

Brad’s going to cover the task of finding out what’s taking up so much room on our hard drive and toss out the stuff we don’t need. Note that word “need”, not want. There is probably some long forgetting stuff wasting space and slowing down your system. Just don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.

You could easily be running a bunch of stuff in the background that never shows up in the Dock, but is using up memory and using up your CPU’s time. We are going to prune back stuff so your machine will spend more of it’s time on useful stuff. Sometimes the Mac needs some monitoring to see if you are getting decent network performance or if you are running out of memory, so we will talk about that.

Performing regular maintenance will keep your Mac running smoothly, so we’ll go over some suggestions. Often that could include installing newer versions that work better with your computer and current operating system. If all else fails, there maybe some cost effective hardware upgrades to your old Mac that should put off buying a newer model.

Finally, optimizing your use of the computer can make the difference. Learn some keyboard shortcuts and install some software to make your use of the computer more efficient. You and your Mac are a team.

Of course before our MacBasics main demonstration we'll have our own novice Q&A session across the hall, while Bradley's dealing with the more complicated problems in the main room.