Open the Activity Monitor by searching for it with Spotlight (keyboard shortcut: hold down the Command button while pressing the spacebar).

In a previous version of this article, I recommended that you replace your MacBook ( 899 at Back Market ) s traditional spinning hard drive with a solid-state drive (SSD) and add more RAM, but those two maneuvers have become outdated.

For starters, MacBooks for the better part of the past decade have featured SSDs so you likely already have one unless your MacBook is ancient.

Secondly, MacBooks in recent years feature RAM and SSDs that are soldered to the motherboard, making user upgrades all but impossible.

Therefore, the following five tips will help speed up your Mac without replacing any of its hardware.

For Macs, its easy.

Grab an external drive and run Time Machine.

Dr Cleaner Cnet Free Up Storage

Free up storage space Sometimes, all your MacBook needs is a data cleanup.

Dr Cleaner Cnet Free Space Remains

You can check out how much free space remains on your MacBooks drive by clicking the Apple logo in the top left, select About This Mac and then click the Storage tab.

If you are approaching maximum capacity, click the Manage button to free up some space.

Here, youll see four recommendations for reclaiming free drive space.

You can move all the files stored on your desktop and Documents folder from your Macs drive to iCloud.

And you can store full-resolution photos in iCloud and keep what Apple calls optimized versions on your Mac that take up much less space.

If you snap lots of photos with your iPhone ( 699 at Amazon ), using the iCloud Photo Library is probably this single biggest space saver for your Mac.

Keep in mind that you will likely run up against the free 5GB allotment on iCloud and begin to pay for space on Apples cloud.

Upgrading to 50GB will cost you 0.99 a month, and the two bigger plans offer 200GB for 2.99 a month or 2TB for 9.99 a month.

Its cheaper than buying a new Mac.

The second option lets you optimize storage for the TV app by removing downloaded movies and shows after you watch them.

The third option automatically cleans out the trash, removing items that have been sitting in the Trash for more than 30 days.

The last option, Reduce Clutter, lets you review large files, downloads and unsupported apps and manually delete those you no longer need.

Perform some First Aid Next, lets clean up the applications you are keeping.

When you install an app on your Mac, the piece of software arrives as part of a package of files, including permissions that tell MacOS which users can do what things with specific files.

Over time, these permissions can get changed, resulting in your Mac lagging, freezing or crashing.

Repairing these disk permissions, in the most basic terms, amounts to shuffling and re-dealing these permissions so that they return to their rightful place.

To address this, MacOS has a built-in tool called Disk Utility that lets you run First Aid on your Macs disk.

It can also repair issues with disk partitions and start-up processes.

Dr Cleaner Mac Cnet