Joe Kissell - Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac

Welcome to Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac, version 1.0, published in May 2011 by TidBITS Publishing Inc. This book was written by Joe Kissell and edited by Adam Engst.

Dont settle for a sluggish Mac! This comprehensive book teaches you how to find the exact causes of slow performance and take steps to make your Mac snappy and responsive.

If you have an ebook version of this title, please note that if you want to share it with a friend, we ask that you do so as you would a physical book: lend it for a quick look, but ask your friend to buy a new copy to read it more carefully or to keep it for reference. Discounted classroom and Mac user group copies are also available.

Copyright 2011, Joe Kissell. All rights reserved.

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Download any available new version of the ebook for free, or purchase any subsequent edition at a discount.

Download various formats, including PDF, EPUB, andusuallyMobipocket. (Learn about reading this ebook on handheld devices at http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/device-advice .)

Read postings to the ebooks blog. These may include new information and tips, as well as links to author interviews. At the top of the blog, you can also see any update plans for the ebook.

Get a discount when you order a print copy of the ebook.

Here are a few rules of the road that will help you read this book:

Menus: Where I describe choosing a command from a menu in the menu bar, I use an abbreviated description. For example, to create a new folder in the Finder, you choose New Folder from the File menu; I abbreviate this by saying File > New Folder.

Contextual menus: In Mac OS X, when you hold down the Control key and click, a pop-up contextual menu appears, with commands appropriate to whatever is under the mouse pointer. For example, if you Control-click a file in the Finder, youll see commands such as Get Info, Duplicate, and Make Alias. Control-clicking nearly always works to open a contextual menu, but your mouse or trackpad might support a better method. The default behavior, the alternative methods, and the ways to set them vary depending on the type of input device; the typical alternative (for right-handed users) is to right-click with a mouseclick the right-hand mouse buttonso thats the term this book uses by default for the action that opens a contextual menu.

Finding System Preferences: I sometimes refer to settings in System Preferences that you may want to adjust. To open System Preferences, click its icon in the Dock or choose Apple > System Preferences. When the System Preferences window opens, click the icon of the pane whose settings you want to adjust. I refer to these panes using an abbreviated notation such as the Network preference pane.

Finding an applications preferences: I often refer to preferences in an application that you may want to adjust. Dont confuse an applications preferences with the system-wide settings found in System Preferences. To access an applications preferences, choose Application Name > Preferences. For example, in the program Disk Utility, you would choose Disk Utility > Preferences.

Path syntax: This book occasionally uses a path to show the location of a file or folder in your file system. For example, Mac OS X stores most utilities, such as Terminal, in the Utilities folder. The path to Terminal is: /Applications/Utilities/Terminal .

The slash at the beginning of the path tells you to start from the root level of the disk. You will also encounter paths that begin with ~ (tilde), which is a shortcut for the users home directory. For example, if a person with the user name joe wants to install fonts that only he can access, he would install the fonts in his ~/Library/Fonts folder, which is just another way of writing /Users/joe/Library/Fonts .

Disks and drives: Not so long ago, every Mac came with a hard disk as its main data storage device. These days, one can no longer assume that; a new Mac you buy today might have one or more hard disk drives, one or more solid-state drives (SSDs), or a combination of the two. In this book, I frequently use the term disk to refer to your Macs main storage device, regardless of the technology it uses; when my instructions vary depending on whether that device is a mechanical hard drive or an SSD, I spell out those differences.

Big cats: I frequently mention features specific to a particular version of Mac OS X, which Apple usually refers to by a big cat code name:

Lion: Mac OS X 10.7

Snow Leopard: Mac OS X 10.6

Leopard: Mac OS X 10.5

Tiger: Mac OS X 10.4

Panther: Mac OS X 10.3