Category: performance

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performance

What is the ‘Other’ data hogging all the disc space on my macbook?

I have a friend who  has a 120 GB MacBook Air and his hard drive was filling up. There were lots of suggestions on the Internet as to what might be causing it – Spotify cache,  system files, movies,  but what’s the best way to find out what is using up your hard disk space?  An old but I think still the best application for doing this is Disk Inventory X.  I wrote an article back in 2010 on how to use it here: Disk Inventory X.   Seven years later disc inventory X is still the best app for this so here’s a bit of a reminder on how to use it.

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performance

How I saved 30 GB of disk space in El Capitan

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My MacBook Air is running a 120GB SSD drive so I don’t want my hard drive full of excess things I don’t need. I just noticed after El Capitan that I lost a lot of space. I only had 10GB free. To run well a mac hard disk needs at least 20% free.  Here’s how I freed up some more space.

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hardware performance Presentations

How to disable the exit presentation button on a Logitec R400 wireless presenter

In this article I reviewed the Logitech wireless presenter. It is in my opinion the best remote control to use with Keynote. That particular Logitech remote has been replaced by the new Logitech R400 which doesn’t feel as robust, the main buttons are smaller, and it still has the 2 smaller buttons, one which completely exits out of your keynote presentation!  The last thing you want is to press the wrong button and be taken out of your keynote back to the desktop.

The smaller two buttons  can be easily disabled with a knife. This article describes how to disable the extra 2 buttons.  It really is a simple procedure and doesn’t even require any soldering!

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performance

How to free up some Hard disk space.

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Is your old laptop or computer running a bit slowly? It could be that the hard drive is too small and all your hard disk space is all used up. Here are a few different ways to recover some extra Hard Drive space.

You should never fill your hard drive to more than approx 80% capacity or it will slow down performance?

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advanced performance

How to find the fastest DNS

A domain name server (DNS) is like the phone-book of the internet. Every time you enter a webpage in your browser, it looks up a DNS to find out where the website is before it goes there. Open DNS and google offer a free DNS service, but how do you know if it’s any faster that the one you have?
Your ISP will provide you with some numbers to put in your System Preferences/ Network / DNS Server. It’s probably best not to touch these, but here is how to find the best settings if you want to change them.

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advanced internet macintoshhowto performance

How do I speed up my webpage?

speed
You’ve made a webpage, but people are complaining that it’s too slow to load.
It may be that they have a slow computer, or it may be that your webpage has too many large files in it, and it should be made smaller. Safari can tell you how many files it needs to load, and how big they are. Here’s how.

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drivers performance software

How to run Windows on a Mac

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O dear, this is a tragic topic. Nevertheless, I just installed Windows XP on my Intel Macintosh and it was easy! Windows XP set me back $115, but innotek VirtualBox, the program that let me run windows, was free. It’s pretty fast – it takes about 20 seconds to start Windows (that’s faster than my OSX boots!) and about 6 seconds to turn it off.

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performance

How to clean up your ‘Open With’ Menu

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This one is quite an advanced tip.
If you right-click on a file you get a little menu, and if you select ‘open with’ you get a list of all the programs you can open a file with.
After a while of installing new versions of programs, this list can become quite long!

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