How to speed up Mac OS X

I’ve had an iMac for about 2 years and have recently noticed that it’s getting a little slower at booting up. So I’ve spent so time trying to improve it. This is what I found and how I recommend speeding up a mac in the future.

• Check login items for your user account and remove programs that you don’t need. This can be found thorough systems.app then user accounts. I found that I still had software running at start up for a scanner that I didn’t have anymore.
• Time spent loading with grey and blue boot screens aren’t usually related to programs running in the background.
• Use a maintenance program like Cocktail or Leopard Cache Cleaner both are shareware and can be used without paying for although I’d recommended buying 1 of them if you find it useful to support the developers. Both programs are very similar but Cocktail has a built in scheduler to run maintenance scripts and power down your system which is a nice feature. Leopard Cache Cleaner can run an antivirus scanner so you may want to run bits of both programs.
• Delete programs, movies, albums that you no longer want. A hard drive more than 75% full seems to slow down the system a little. Using a program like Tidy Up can make this easier.
• Reboot the system then run a program called console straight away. It come with the mac. Just search for it using spotlight and click run. This will give you a log of what your system has been doing. I noticed that there were about 20 log entries for VMware fusion, a program that I’d removed a few months earlier. A quick google search and download later and I had an uninstaller program to remove VMware fusion properly from my system.
• Run the activing monitor program that came with your Mac and watch for programs that use alot of CPU or RAM of anykind. If you don’t need the program or can find an alternative that uses less resources remove the program from your system.
• Unplug any devices attached to your Mac except for your mouse and keyboard. Restart and see if this improves boot time, if so then reattach items one by one rebooting in between until you find which item is causing the problem. I found that my USB hub added an extra 20 seconds to the boot time. If this happens to you consider getting another USB hub or just be happy knowing that you’ve found part of the problem and that it’s nothing to worry about.