What Are The Most Common Causes of Slow MacBook

According to a study, the average American wastes about two hours per week waiting on a slow computer.

Perhaps you are curious about what is causing your slow MacBook so that you can spend that time doing something useful.

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Thankfully, we have some of the common causes of MacBook problems and what to do about it, so make sure you keep reading!

Too Many Apps Running

All of these apps at once can drain your system, even if they’re just running in the background.

All you need to do to fix this is to just quit the applications you’re not using. Not only will this speed up your computer, but it will also improve the bandwidth, battery life, and system resources as well.

If you’re not sure what apps are causing a problem, you can check Activity Monitor. This is a built-in app that comes with every Mac. It’s a great resource to tell you where your computer is working at each time.

You’ll be able to see the memory, network, disk activity, usage, and CPU.

You’ll be able to troubleshoot with your Mac and the Activity Monitor, but the problem is many people don’t know how to work it.

To use this, go to your Finder and type in Utilities. Once you’re there, you can select the Activity Monitor.

Now this will tell you what the top apps were on your computer within the last twelve hours.

It’ll even organize it into five tabs for you. This can be by memory, energy, disk, network, and CPU. The largest apps on these tabs are probably going to be what’s slowing your computer down.

All you have to do is click on that app and press force close.

Select Activity Monitor, and it will show you the top applications in the last 12 hours, with real-time data regarding energy impact, battery info, and more.

Website is Using Resources

When a website is slow, it could affect the internet as a whole. It could be a problem with the remote server or the network, so make sure that you check that to see if it solves the issue of the slow internet.

The way to free up space for your computer is to close a slowly-loading website or one that has many items to load.

Not Enough RAM

Your computer runs on Random Access Memory (RAM), which it uses to help keep temporary information. Your hard drive can be used for long-term storage, but it’s not as fast.

Your RAM can still get full, and when it is, your computer will start running slower as well. Depending on your Mac model, you may be able to purchase more RAM. But if you can’t, you may want to kill some things that are running in the background. D

However, some apps will still keep using RAM even if they’re not open and running. That’s when you go to the Activity Monitor to force close these.

To do some MacBook maintenance, you’ll check if your RAM is full. Go to the Activity Monitor. You can access this from the utility section.

From there, click on the memory tab. You can then look at the graph of memory pressure. It should be at the bottom of the window.

If your graph is showing up green, you have enough RAM to use. If it’s yellow, you’re getting close to your limit. If it’s red, it’s full or about to be.

You can also use different apps to help clean out things that might be using up your RAM.

For more help on this, check out this link: https://setapp.com/.

Wi-Fi Issues

If you think your Wi-Fi is slow, you can run a diagnostics test on it. To do this, you need to open the diagnostics and press the Alt or Option key. You should be holding and clicking the Wi-Fi icon in the top right corner as well.

A drop-down menu will appear, and you can click on “Open Wireless Diagnostics.” This will run some tests to see what’s slowing your computer down.

You’ll then have the choice of just monitoring your connection or seeing a summary of the results.

If you click continue, you’ll see all kinds of information about your Wi-Fi connection. You might need to know enough about technology to understand it though.

Instead, it might be better to have Apple’s software take care of monitoring and fixing the connection on its own.

In general, you should be using a router that supports 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

Software Is Out of Date

Are you someone that always lets your updates pile up? You should go into your computer and make sure they’re set to automatically update.

Not only will this save you time and keep your computer protected, but your computer will always be running on the latest compatible software, and you won’t have to worry about slowing down.