If you’ve eliminated RAM and processor performance, then the next thing to look at is the hard drive. For just about every action you ask the computer to do, it has to read or write data to the hard drive. This is, in computer terms, extremely slow. So if you are using Photoshop, Final Cut, InDesign or other programs that extensively use the disk, you will often find that you have RAM to spare, the CPU is barely ticking over, but the machine feels unresponsive because it’s thrashing the hard drive. So what can you do to improve this?

1. Make sure that you have at least 20 GB of free disk space, more if you can. Hard drives slow down as they get more full, as continuous sections of free space get harder to find, and data gets written to the inner, slower sections of disk. Don’t de-fragment – get a bigger disk.
2. Check the disk for errors using Disk Utility or another tool. Repair if necessary.
3. Check the system.log for disk I/O. If you see any backup your entire drive and replace it at the first opportunity.
4. Get a faster drive. You can achieve this in any number of ways, spending from £50 to many thousands.

The easiest and cheapest option is to just replace the internal drive with a faster speed drive. So if you have a 5400rpm drive, get a 7200 rpm, 100oo rpm or 15000 rpm model. The next option is to get a faster drive by setting up a RAID 0 “Striped” array. Personally I think you’re nuts if you do this without a rock solid backup system. My preferred option is to replace the startup disk with a Solid State Disk (SSD).

SSDs can be massively faster if you choose your model carefully. You have to be particularly careful if you use a Mac, because OS X doesn’t support the TRIM command that helps keep many drives fast and healthy. Apple do supply Configure To Order (CTO) MacBooks and iMacs with SSDs, but they don’t have a history of fitting the highest performing drives available. My advice is to choose your own SSD and then get it fitted. As of now, the rule seems to be buy a drive with a “Sandforce” controller to get the best performance on a Mac that maintains that performance. The greatest perceived improvement will be seen by MacBook owners, as laptops drives are even slower than the bigger desktop models.

Because SSD drives are so hideously expensive, many people dismiss them as an option as they don’t offer enough storage. However, I’m currently fitting an internal SSD into my MacBook Pro, giving me a 64GB SSD boot drive and a 250GB SATA drive that replaces the Superdrive. This means my MacBook has 2 internal drives, one screamingly fast that runs OS X, applications and scratch space, the other tolerably quick that holds the majority of my data.

Looking for a professional SSD upgrade service for your MacBook Pro, Mac Pro or iMac? What to fit an extra internal hard drive to your MacBook Pro? Please get in touch…

If you’ve eliminated low RAM as the major reason your Mac is running slow, the next thing to look at is processor power. When people talk about getting a “faster computer”, they are almost invariably talking about getting a quicker processor. However in my experience much of the time this isn’t the problem, unless they are playing games, doing hardcore video editing or computational programming.

So how do you know if your processor is slowing you down? Easy. Open Activity Monitor, click in the “% CPU” column and keep an eye on which Processes are taking more than 50%. If you have a machine with multiple processors you should be seeing programs taking more than 100%. Sounds weird, but each processor core is considered 100%, so if you have a Quad-core machine you have a theoretical 400% to play with. If you click into the CPU tab, you can see a historical activity chart showing processor utilisation per core. If these are consistently high, you machine is CPU performance bound.

The only option in this instance is to get a machine with greater performance. Either a faster processor or more processor cores.

Over the years I’ve had probably hundreds of people say to me “my Mac’s running slowly, should I get a new one?”. Typically they’ll have gone to one of the Apple Mac retailers in Bath or Bristol to buy a Mac and had the virtues of the latest Macs extolled to them, and left with the warm glow of certainty that spending lots of money with transform their lives.

Sometimes this is true. Newer, faster hardware may be the solution. But often it’s not the whole story. There are a large number of factors that control the perceived performance of a computer and working out which is the “Rate Limiting Step”, to borrow a phrase from chemistry, can go a way to getting better performance from what you already have.

So how do you know if I have too little memory? The surest sign is that when you have a number of programs open, when you try to switch between them the computer grinds to a halt as the hard drive thrashes noisily. So what’s going on?

For every program that you have open, the Mac has to put aside space to remember what the program is doing. If it can it’ll use free space in the RAM (the ultra-fast short term memory of the computer). If there is not enough free space in RAM, it’ll write it to the hard disk, which is many many times slower. Think in these terms: when you go shopping, often you can remember what you want in your head and recalling is almost instantaneous. But sometimes your shipping list is too big to remember; so you have to write it down, then read it to remember what you wanted. Much, much, much slower. When you have insufficient RAM, you Mac will constantly be writing information to the hard disk, which is slow.

You can use the Activity Monitor application to see how much RAM programs are gobbling and how much the hard disk is being thrashed. Look in the System Memory tab and see how much “Free” memory you have and particularly look to see if the “Page Outs” increases over time. “Page Outs” indicates how frequently the computer is having to use swap space instead of RAM.

If the answer is a lot, try closing the programs that gobble the most RAM. Everything runs quicker? Then you need to buy more RAM…

But never fear, if you search around, you can often find some fairly tasty discount codes. I managed to get 20% off with a code I found from http://www.retailmenot.com/

If you hold down F2 on startup, you may, depending on your model, be able to start the hardware tests. Typically they won’t find anything, unless you enable test looping (Apple + L) and leave it running for a few days, but it’s worth a quick look.

A customer in Bath had a problem with it intermittently failing to boot; which could point to a failing MacBook hard drive. I replaced the drive, copied their data onto the new drive and took a Time Machine backup. However I couldn’t find any evidence in the system.log of disk I/O errors, so a quick trip into the hardware tests was called for, which also revealed nothing…

However if you use Subversion (SVN) you can easily roll-back to previously committed versions and avoid some of the pain. Subversion clients are 10 a penny, and some like Versions for OS X are a real work of art. However, I use Netbeans as my IDE of choice and it comes with pretty good SVN integration. There’s a nice tutorial available here.

If you find you’ve commited to the wrong Repository or Folder, trashes the .snv folder inside the project from the Terminal with:

find ./ -name '.svn' | xargs rm -Rf

If you want to know what folders are in a Repository, use:

svn list --verbose file:///path to repository

And if you created a Project with the wrong name, you can clean up with

svn delete -m 'Message here' file:///path to repository/branch to delete

You can find out more here.

Outlook 2001 used the MAPI protocol to talk to Exchange email and calendaring servers, and did so perfectly. Then Microsoft decided to release Entourage as part of Office X for OS X, which used the HTTP webmail protocol, and to be frank, was a pale shadow for the Windows Outlook client. I remember loads of clients who clung onto Outlook 2001, running in Classic mode, just because Entourage was so crap.

A few days ago I was asked by a local veterinarian to look into switching his office from PCs to a Mac based solution, with the sticking points being Sage and Exchange. Normally I’m quite cautious about these things, because whilst Macs have some distinct advantages over Windows, businesses run by process. If your computer system forces you to significantly change your processes, they can end up being expensive white elephants. Sage can be covered by Parallels or VM Ware. But Exchange? I’ve had plenty of pain over the years trying to get Macs integrated into Exchange server in a way that doesn’t disappoint PC veterans.

So like any good provider of Mac technical support, I decided to test first. I setup a remote support session, and configured Apple Mail, iCal and AddressBook to syncronise with the Exchange server. Then we setup a demo of Entourage 2008 to connect to the Exchange server. And then left the client to test.

Very quickly a problem reared its head. Neither iCal or Entourage would show the colour of appointments in the calendar, and the client uses colour coding. Not to be deterred, I decided to see if the soon to be released Outlook 2011 for Mac would solve this problem. Fortunately it does. Not only that, configuration is relatively painless as it does a lot of auto-discovery of the required settings, much like Apple Mail.

Whilst Office 2011 isn’t on sale yet, it will be within the next couple of months, and with a free upgrade from Office 2008 if you’ve bought it after August 2010. The future looks brighter for Mac users struggling with Exchange…

1. Apple iMac 27″ 2.8Ghz Core i7, 4Gb, 1TB, refurb – £1399 inc VAT and delivery.
2. Apple iMac 27″ 2.66Ghz Core i5, 4Gb, 1TB, refurb – £1269 inc VAT and delivery.
3. Apple iMac 21.5″ 3.06Ghz, 4GB, 500GB refurb – £749 inc VAT and postage. Very nice!! -
4. Apple MacBook 2.4GHz, 2GB, 250GB refurb – £719 inc VAT and delivery.
5. Apple MacBook Pro 13″ 2.4Ghz, 4GB, 250GB refurb – £849 inc VAT and delivery

Quite often it’s because of the plethora of banner adverts on web pages. These banners are made in Adobe Flash, and this makes your computer work a bit harder for every piece of Flash on display. This presents PPC Mac users a particular problem. Why?

1. Flash Player for OS X has never been as highly optimised as it is for Windows. So if you have two identical computers, one running on Windows and the other on OS X, the machine running OS X will have to work harder to show the Flash content.
2. Flash Player running on PPC chips is much slower than running on Intel chips. It’s something to do with being big-endian and little-endian if I recall. Think of it in terms of Intel chips reading left to right, PPC reading right to left. Flash Player is designed to read things from left to right, so if you’re using a PPC chip, it has to translate every.
3. PPC chips are slow in modern terms. Even G5 powered machines have less grunt that a typical Core 2 Duo powered modern Mac.

So what can you do? The best solution I have found is only use Firefox for browser, and install the Flash Block plugin. This will block all Flash content, unless you click on it. Presto, instant performance boost.

Got performance problems with your Mac? Don’t want to spend a huge amount on a new Mac? Based near Bath or Bristol? Get in touch…