It’s perhaps one of the most frustrating moments of any Mac user’s life: you power your Mac up and see nothing but a gray screen, and immediately you’ll know you’re going to have a bad day. Or perhaps you’ll be treated to a flashing folder with a question mark or a circle with a slash symbol instead of the Apple logo, and the computer becomes unresponsive. Take a deep breath and prepare an espresso, because you are going to be spending some time troubleshooting your Mac. Your Mac has a startup problem, and now you’ll need to figure out which of the many possible causes is responsible, and try to solve that problem. Read More…
Mac Optimization Articles
Best Ways to Improve and Extend Your MacBook’s Battery Life
One of the most appealing features of the MacBook is its battery life – just consider the 12 hours of the MacBook Air – along with their build quality and the software that comes with it. Still, when you start using the device you may well get a battery whose life is different to that of Apple’s testing. The reason is because the machine’s battery life depends on usage. Read More…
Why, When and How to Reset SMC on Mac
If your Mac is behaving strangely and you feel every possible troubleshooting option has been exhausted, then there are probably still two steps left to try first. There are two system functions that can be reset that might resolve your issues, either the NVRAM/PRAM or the SMC. Here we will cover the latter and tell you why, when and how to reset the SMC to solve certain Mac problems. Read More…
How to Set up IPVanish on macOS
Mac users running macOS Sierra have various options to set up IPVanish, the VPN service we found to be among the best available. They can either: a) use the macOS desktop client; b) manually set it up via System Preferences; c) use an OpenVPN client. In this article we will guide you through the different setup methods.
IPVanish supports four protocols: OpenVPN, IPSec, L2TP and PPTP. Apple phased out support for the last of these in macOS Sierra, but Mac users running macOS 10.11 or earlier can still use this protocol. Read More…
How to Speed up the Internet Connection on Your Mac
There are a number of wireless network settings that affect the performance of your Wi-Fi connection, some of which may currently make your internet slower than it could be.
Troubleshooting
If you want web pages to load more quickly, YouTube or Netflix to stream smoother, and faster downloads, then you need to optimize your Wi-Fi connection and ensure you have the best equipment to make that possible. Assuming that the latter is a given (don’t use a first-generation AirPort Extreme Base Station, for example), then start by testing your internet speed: plug the Ethernet cable directly into your Mac, visit Speedtest.net, and click “Go”.
Since the router is the centerpiece of any Wi-Fi network, it can affect the speed of your internet connection if configured improperly. So have a look at the manual before proceeding and make any necessary changes, if required, based on the manufacturer’s recommendations. Read More…
The Dangers of Using Secure Erase Apps on Macs With SSDs
With macOS 10.11 El Capitan Apple removed the “Secure Erase” and “Erasing Free Space” features from Disk Utility, saying that they were not needed for a the solid-state drives that are standard in modern Macs because a standard erase makes it difficult to recover data from an SSD. Apple recommends using FileVault instead, which uses encryption to protect your data. And it’s true, you should definitely take care when securely deleting data from an SSD. Read More…
How Long Does a Mac Last?
When you’re planning to purchase a computer, one of the most obvious questions is how long will it last? The question is very difficult to answer, since durability and longevity is influenced by many factors. Read More…
Optimizing Photo Storage: A Breath of Fresh Air for Your Mac
Taking photos has never been as easy, as fun or as common as it is right now, and that’s mostly thanks to the spread of smart devices, making it an activity that virtually anybody can take part in. However, it does come with a not-so-tiny problem: none of the cameras in modern smart devices can take great quality pictures that are less than 1MB. So unless you do something about your pictures, they’ll soon start to occupy the already limited space on your iPhone/iPad or computer, forcing it to underperform in every aspect: speed, processing, loading and more. This is why it is essential to maintain your photo library – and without having to copy/paste everything to a brutally expensive hard drive. Read More…
10 Most Common Problems With Mac and Their Solutions
The best way to test your Mac’s performance – aside from benchmarking – is by creating a new account.
If the new account is faster, then you’d better have a look at ways to optimize your Mac.
But there are so many issues that your Mac might encounter in its lifetime, so in this article we will cover ten of the most common problems that cause Mac slowdown, and how to fix them. Read More…
Preview of macOS High Sierra: APFS, Safari 11.0 and Beyond
Apple introduced macOS High Sierra – a follow-up, as its name suggests, to macOS Sierra – during the annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in mid 2017. It looks like the company has listened to the Mac community, which has been asking them to focus on quality instead of pushing out a major OS release every year with a huge list of new features. As the co-founder of Tumblr and creator of Instapaper, Marco Arment, highlighted in a blog post in 2015: “We need computers… to work well first so we can enjoy new features released at a healthy, gradual, sustainable pace.”Read More…