Friday, 2 November 2012

Troubleshooting Your Frozen Mac


Even though you selected your Mac for its reliability and superior performance, your Mac isn’t perfect. Sometimes your computer can slow down abruptly and even freeze to complete stop. Even if this problem is new to you and your Mac, you are not alone. Unfortunately, plenty of Mac users have seen their system slow down and stop altogether.

Once your Mac freezes or slows, you can often get it back on track yourself. You can end applications that are using massive amounts of memory and CPU through the Activity Monitor and Force Quit. You could even manually power your system down to get your Mac back on track. 

To prevent a future slowdown or freeze up, you should troubleshoot the reason for the initial problem. Whatever caused this first slowdown will most likely cause another. The following are four things to look into to prevent future system slowdowns and deep freezes on your Mac.

Search for Viruses
Macs do get viruses; it doesn’t matter what the old advertising said because these threats are now quite real. If you don’t already have antivirus or antimalware software on your system, it is best that you get one of these security suites for your mac as soon as you can. These programs can scan for parasites infecting your system and covertly draining system resources. If you have antivirus, consider trying a second malware protection product to scan for a malicious program that may be hiding from your existing protection.

Don’t Overdo It
Everyone and everything in our modern world is multitasking, and this included your Mac. However, if you give your system too much to do at one time, you can actually overload your Mac. If you give it too much to do, it simply won’t be able to process applications that exceed its maximum performance abilities. To remedy this, you can try to limit yourself to one or two applications at a time or you can upgrade your machine.

Monitor your Memory
If your Mac is nearly out of memory, it is no surprise that it is slowing down. Often more than one application at a time can slow or even cripple these systems. Explore a bit around your Mac to see how much memory is left, or if you are computer savvy, try installing more memory. This usually is only the case with older models, but think about checking out this avenue anyway, just in case.

Watch the Hard Drive
Just like with memory, your hard disk can get overloaded and can slow your system down dramatically. Old, unused applications and their settings and associated files can take up a lot of disk space. Getting rid of unnecessary apps and data can help. Also, certain functions can trying to run at the same time can cause a major slowdown; for example, if your Mac is super slow on startup, you may need to cut back on applications launching at start up. 

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