Increase Mac speed by optimizing Mac
Enhance Mac performance with simple Mac optimization tips and tools. Keep your Mac running smooth and secure with easy to use applications.
Tuesday 17 March 2015
Tuesday 29 October 2013
How to Keep Mac OS X Mavricks optimized?
Apple's OS X Mavericks(10.9) is now
available at Mac App store. If Mac uses have minimum requirement like
you are running Mountain Lion then you can download Mavricks. There
are many new applications e.g- Maps and iBooks, redesigned system
apps, and new energy - saving technologies like App Nap and Safari
Power Saver etc. Mavricks OS X has the great ability to manage less
power consumption.
Some advanced/new features of Mavricks
OS X:-
Finder-
In Mavericks, there is a new character
popover to access special character. You can also access the
old-style Special Characters window by clicking the icon next to the
search field. You can also access old version from here- File >
Revert To > Browse All Versions. This new updated finder will
allow you to open a new tab in Finder with ⌘T. You can move between
open tabs with ⌃⇧⇥ and ⌃⇥.
iBook-
This application is very helpful for
those who love reading. You can import books from iTunes in this
iBook Apps and read them.
Notification Center -
It will show you a new battery
notification for low power, users can see the contact photos for
Messages from Banner notifications. New message button is added on
the top of the notification centre, when you click, it will open a
small compose box similar to the Tweet and Facebook. widgets.
Safari:- Safari’s AutoFill settings
have a new option for adding and managing credit card information.
There are new option in Preferences > Advanced lets Safari stop
Internet plugins to save power. Whenever you would open safari 7, you
will see the top sites(google, facebook, twitter etc.) on that page.
Maps:- If you are planning to trip
through your Mac then it helps you to show directions automatically
when you will be on road. You can look up directions on your Mac and
send them to all your iOS devices.
Calender:- This apps has new look in
Mavricks OS X. You can manage your time easily with this tool, this
apps will show you the address location when you do start typing
during event editing process.
iCloud chain:- This apps helps you to
keep remember website user names and passwords on the Mac and iOS
devices you’ve added and always update them. It allows protection
for them with robust 256-bit AES encryption. You can also keep credit
card information with this application.
Tag:- This app helps you to organize
and find your files. You can tag the files which is important to any
single keyword.
New features will definitely helps you
to do your work easily, but there are some third party tools which
help to keep your Mac optimized and smooth in performance. Stellar
Drive Defrag is one of the famous tools to defrag your Mac and
increase it's performance. With the passage of time, your Mac becomes
slow because of fragmented data scatters over Mac disk. However, new
OS X 10.9 has great power to minimize fragmentation with some
limitations.
Defrag tool of Stellar is a very good
option to defrag OS X Mavricks easily. Just go through it and stay
away from worries of slow Mac.
Monday 30 September 2013
How to get rid of badly fragmented Mac drive
Fragmentation
in Mac:-
In
general words, file means a single entity which we open, work and
close. As an example we can consider a file like a book which has
several pages, each page remains in a logical order to read it
properly. In technical words, a file is a bunch of small pieces of
data which is kept in sequential order over Mac disk. Your system
keeps the track of individual piece of data to access it fastly. With
the passage of time, these files gets divided and it is being kept in
scattered way over Mac disk, which is called fragmented data. Files
can become "fragmented" over time as they are changed and
saved. Why fragmentation happens?
Fragmentation happens because files on the disk are constantly changing; being created, deleted, grown, or shrunk in size. For example, we have created three files: file1, file2 and file3
At present these files are organised into contigious memory in above added image.
Now
we delete file2 lets see the situation :-
You
can see the free space(two empty sectors) in above image.
Now,
we'll create a new file, file 4, which is four sectors long.
File4 is splitted into two fragments ,two sectors in part "(a)" and two sectors in part "(b)". When Mac drive gets full of these kind of fragmented data, it is called badly fragmented drive. When you access(click) any fragmented files, Mac OS puts extra efforts to search over whole disk and it takes too much time. Due to this reason your Mac becomes slow. Defragmentation is the cure of fragmented volume and it helps to improve your Mac performance.
"The process of collecting each file fragments and keeping them back together in logical order is known as optimization or defragmentation"
This process helps to arrange all pieces of files in logical order. However, Apple says that it's new file system HFS+ is able to defrag files of upto 20 MB file size and Mac OS Extended formatting (HFS Plus) avoids reusing space from deleted files as much as possible. In case of large files you have to buy some defragmenter for Mac.
Do we need to optimize Mac?
Defragmenting your hard drive can make a real sense and significant difference to your systems performance.
SSD- If you are using SSD then you do not need to defrag it because there is no movement, and there's actually no practical advantage to sectors which is being logically adjacent.
HDD- In case of HDD, you need to defrag your Mac because there is movement and each data remains in sectors which is logically arrenged.
Sometimes
fragmentation occurs by continually appending data to existing files,
many applications simply rewrite the entire file each time.
There are many Mac disk defragmenter available in market like iDefrag, Drive Genius etc.. Stellar Drive Defrag is a versatile option to defrag Mac safely and it is fast, efficient defrag tool that ensures your system is always running at its optimum performanceIt's free version helps to see how badly your Mac disk fragmented. 2.5 version of this tool has several new features like email notification, temperature bar etc.
There are many Mac disk defragmenter available in market like iDefrag, Drive Genius etc.. Stellar Drive Defrag is a versatile option to defrag Mac safely and it is fast, efficient defrag tool that ensures your system is always running at its optimum performanceIt's free version helps to see how badly your Mac disk fragmented. 2.5 version of this tool has several new features like email notification, temperature bar etc.
Features
of Stellar Drive Defrag tool:-
1.It
performs complete defragmentation to your entire volume by dragging
the files into contiguous memory.
2.
It defrags the metadata files in a Mac volume, clubs together the
scattered free spaces in a volume.
3.
This tool creates a bootable DVD, which is used to defrag the boot
volume and also to start your non-booting Mac system.
4.
It helps to gather all free space into a contiguous block.
5.
Email notification helps you to notify the completion of defrag
process
6.
It includes temperature bar to keep an eye to the fluctuations of Mac
drive temperature.
Conclusion:
If you constantly increase and decrease your Mac hard drive size with
lots of little files, you love to video editing, photoshop
regularly, leave your machine running all night and you are facing
slow Mac then you must get Stellar Drive Defrag to defrag drive Mac. It works awesome and
ia a very reliable tool. I would like to say, just download it's demo
version, scan your entire Mac and check the status of your hard
drive. If it is badly fragmented just spend only $ 39 bucks and
remove fragmented data to keep Mac optimized.Thursday 12 September 2013
An Efficient way to handle Mac fragmentation
One of my friends used to work with Mac
OS X – 10.4 Tiger. Over a period of time, his Mac starting performing
slow. Applications began to take more than usual time to open. He
shared his problem with me. As I am not an expert so, started
searching online for some ways to improve performance of Mac.
During my investigation, I got some
prominent reasons for sluggish behavior of Mac and one of them is
Fragmentation. With the passage of time we delete, create so many
files , which creates spaces in Mac hard drive and starting to keep
data into small pieces, called fragmentation. I would like to discuss
in detail so that you could understand the facts of fragmentation.
When you save files(e.g, ten files) on
Mac and they all take continuous positions on the hard drive, and
out of these ten, you delete the fifth-one. After that, save a new
file, this new file takes the space freed by the fifth-one. But, What
will happen if the size of this new file is larger than deleted one. New file will
be divided into chunks and one of which occupies the position freed
by the deleted one and another parts will be kept in different memory
locations. In this case, the Operating System has to create a link to
maintain the linking among these parts of files.
Since, data has not been placed in
contiguous memory location thus, OS will take much time to access
those data. We can overcome this issue by using an efficient
third-party Mac defragmentation software. Later version of Mac OS
(after Mac OS X 10.4) have been introduced with new file system
called HFS+, which can decrease the chances of fragmentation and
handle fragmentaed files upto 20 MB in size.
Whereas, third-party defrag
utilities help to keep all the scattered fragments of data together
in contiguous memory location. You can get back performance of your
Mac. I have suggested my friend to use Stellar Drive Defrag , I went
through various sites, blogs, articles, etc and found this software
as the best one. He has follow my suggestion and get his Mac
performance as a rocket speed.
You can defrag your whole Mac or any selected volume in just a single click. You can optimize the free space of your Mac hard drive. Every information has been written very nicely in the user manual of this tool. I and my friend found it very easy to use and full of useful features.
Thursday 5 September 2013
Which is better for managing Mac partition- Disk Utility or Third party tool?
Disk Utility is an all in one utility
of Mac OS X, which allows you to resolve all disk related issues. Mac
users can perform formatting, partitioning, repairing and some
maintenance on disks including SSDs, flash drives, and disk images
etc. With the passage of time, various installations,
un-installations, upgrades can change the permissions of various
files. Disk utility helps you to repair the permission of certain
files. To do this, click on a disk and then select the “First Aid”
tab, from here you can choose “Verify Disk Permissions”. If
permissions problems are found, you must select “Repair Disk
Permissions”.
How to resize Mac partition with
Disk Utility:-
If your Mac partitions are
encrypted or non journalled then you cannot resize them. You can
turn it on by selecting a particular partition and enable journaling
icon in the toolbar. Open the Disk Utility Applications/Utilities
folder, select the drive and click to partition tab, Disk Utility
will do a Verify Disk on the partition being resized.
But, the interface of Disk Utility is
not user friendly so, there are many third party tools which offer
more easy-to-use interface to resolve Mac disk related issues.
Reliable tool to partition your Mac
drive- Stellar Partition Manager
Many Mac users do not even partition
their Mac hard drive and they keep their data along with the system
files.
Do you know why it is not safe?
If your Mac is unable to boot due to
some reason then you may need to reinstall your Mac OS X and you will
lose all your important data. On other hand, if your Mac OS X has
several partitions, any issue with boot volume does not affect your
data at all. Stellar Partition Manager can easily resolve
partitioning related issues like creation of a new one, formatting,
deletion, resizing hide/reveal a partition. No matter, on which
version of Mac OS X you are working.
Add a Volume;-
Using this application you can easily
create a new volume by using available free space. When you run
Stellar Partition Manager and click to the next button on its home
screen, in left panel just select the hard drive on which you want to
create new partition and click Add button in the toolbar. specify a
name, move the slider to set a size, and click OK button, After that,
click Start button in the toolbar, a warning message pops up. Click
continue and you will see the new volume in the left side and it
would be formatted as Mac OS X Extended by default.
Format a Parition:-
Run this application, select the hard
drive containing the volume to be formatted, on the left. Now, select
this volume in the middle pane and click Format button. Now, click
Start button, and then click Continue button on the message that pops
up , After this task is finished, you can see this partition as
empty.
Delete Partition:-
Select the volume which you want to
delete and click to the delete button on toolbar. This process will
help you to delete selected volume from your Mac hard drive.
Hide/Reveal partition:-
Stellar Partitioning software has an
awesome feature in which you can hide selected volume for security
purpose. This feature is not present in Disk Utility. Hidden
partition can only be revealed by this tool.
Resize Mac partition:-
When you resize Mac volume by using
Stellar Partition tool, it keeps all free spaces together (shift free
space) so that you could make new volume but, this facility is not
present in Disk Utility.
If you do resize on Mac volume with
Disk Utility, free space will remain between two partition. So,
Stellar Partition Manager is quite far better than Disk Utility.
Saturday 31 August 2013
Stellar Drive ToolBox the only one solution of your slow Mac
‘Why is my Mac Running Slow?’, it's very
general question asked by many Mac users and the answer is quite simple ....
Most of us forget to clean Mac drive on
regular basis , which leads to sluggish Mac performance. Mac systems are easy
to use and trouble free but . It doesn't mean , you should ignore system
maintenance. Because ,with the passage of time , there are lots of caches,
hidden files, logs, duplicate files get stored in Mac , which consumes useful
memory space. As a result of this , your Mac becomes more dirtier, hotter,
slower, and less effective than is was on day one. Here are some tips, which
helps you to bring your Macs glory back.
Stellar Drive ToolBox- A powerful and efficient tool to keep your Mac healthy
This software is a complete pack of 13
utilities, different utilities has different features. It has, surface scan,
drive performance, drive status, partition Manager, Speed Up Mac, clone, Drive
defrag, data encryption, wipe, stellar shield, Raw data editor, volume repair,
Drive initilize.
Surface scan:- Very useful tool to detect
bad memory block in Mac drive. It helps to find out all bad sectors in Mac hard
drive and provides information about it. You can resolve disk startup issues,
disk read issues by scanning whole Mac drive with this tool.
Drive Initilize:- You can format your Mac hard drive and create HFS+ and FAT 32
partition. You can initialize your Mac
disk for making it compatible with the PowerPC Mac. You can choose GUID, Apple
partition table or MBR as per need.
Drive Performance:- It helps you to test your
system performance by comparing I/O data transfer rate. You can see the
graphical representation of result after analysing.
Volume Repair:- It safely
verifies, repair and rebuild Mac hard drive volume. It helps you to repair
permissions of various files and applications. 'Rebuild option' performs Verify
and Repair operations simultaneously.
SpeedUp Mac:- This tool helps to scan whole system and deletes all duplicate
files, large files, caches, system junks.
Drive Status:- This module helps to discover all basic details, full drive
description and SMART Status of any Mac hard drive.
Drive Defrag:- This option helps to keep all fragmented data together in Mac hard
drive to increase the speed of Mac. There are many options inside this tool
like full defragmentation, Quick defragmentation, Metadata defragmentation,
bootable DVD. You can get email notification after the completion of defrag
process.
Partition Manager:- This utility
helps you to create, delete, format, resize and manage Mac partitions. These
partitios can be easily hide/reveal for safety purpose.
Stellar shield:- It keeps image of hard drive
and you can restore eaisly from backup.
Raw Data Editor:- An advance users can use this utility. They can change minor
corruption in file structure and modify Mac volume.
Stellar Wipe:- This utility helps to wipe unwanted and sensitive data from Mac
drive. This kind of wipe data helps to stop unauthorised access of your Mac
data.
Drive Clone:- Mac users can easily keep backup of their Mac data by using this
utility. You can either keep your Mac data in the form of image or clone. Clone
helps to create bootable backup of your whole Mac. It allows you resize volumes
on target drive.
Data Encryptor:- Everybody wants to keep data secure, data Encryptor tool is the best
solution of this issues. This tool changes your data into unreadable form and
keep them private so that nobody could read it. Other decryption utility can
not decrypt Mac data. This utility is the bonus utility by Stellar Drive
ToolBox.
This tool of stellar is an awesome and
works effectively with your Mac. However Many people says that Mac is the most
stylist and advance Operating system so one does not need to keep such type of
utility. But, it's my practicle experience that you can keep your Mac running
fast and alive state with the help of using any Third party tool.
Tuesday 20 August 2013
Issues With Time Machine in Mac Mountain Lion
Mac
OS X is one of the most popular operating systems among tech people.
It is very demandable and trustworthy for its unique integrated
features and performance. One of the popular utility is 'Time
Machine'. It is a data back-up utility developed by Apple for the Mac
OS X. It was introduced with the release of Mac OS X 10.5.
The
need of backup was felt a long before the launch of Time Machine in
Mac. Mac users used to backup their data using CD/DVD or writing data
in some external drive. But, it was lengthy and expensive process.
The process was not widely accepted because whenever changes were
made in original data the respective changes were not updated in
respective backup.
Time
Machine creates incremental backups of files, which can be restored
at later date. So, if you delete any files mistakenly, you can
recover easily with time machine. It works with iLife, iWork and
several other compatible programs. Time Machine saves hourly
backups for the past 24 hours, daily backups for the past month, and
weekly backups for everything older than a month until the volume
runs out of space.
How
Time Machine works?
It
copies the files on your computer to a destination hard drive as a
back up to protect you in case of any disaster or data loss. It keeps
Incremental backup and works with Time Capsule.
What
is Time Capsule?
The
backup device used by time machine is called Time capsule. An
external drive is used for keeping Backup data in Mac OS X and it is
called Time capsule.
Incremental
backup- An incremental backup is a type
of backup that only copies files that have changed since the last
backup. It
saves time and money both. But, Mac user can face some limitations or
drawback of Time Machine .
Problems
related to Time Machine in Mountain Lion:-
1.
Backup is not bootable:-
Even though Time Machine backs up every file on your disk but if your
internal HD fails, you can't boot directly from your Time Machine
backups.
However,
if you're using Lion 10.7.2 or above, and backing-up to a
directly-connected external HD, there's probably a copy of your
Recovery HD on the Time Machine drive, so if your internal HD fails,
you can restore from that.
2.
It doesn't keep data forever
:- Time Machine doesn't keep its copies of changed/deleted items
forever, and you're usually not notified when it deletes them(hourly
backups combine and expire after a day).
3.
It doesn't give you much control:- You
can tell Time Machine to ignore particular files or folders by adding
them to its Do Not Back Up list, But, you can’t exclude files based
on certain criteria e.g all movie files over 2GB in size.
4.
Doesn't compress files:- It
doesn’t store duplicate copies of identical files, so it doesn’t
compress your files.
5.
Encryption:- By
physical access of your Time Machine backup disk anyone can read all
your files because It doesn't encrypt them.
6.
Not compatible with
FileVault:-
Time Machine backs up FileVault-encrypted user folders only after
logged out session—and does not permit file-by-file restoration of
your FileVault data using the Time Machine program.
7.
Doesn’t Use Optical Discs
:- Time Machine can store its data only on a hard disk, not on CDs or
DVDs
Keep backup with Stellar Drive
ToolBox:-
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