Does your Mac starts to slow down or eventually crawl after you have worked for a couple of extensive hours? Does your favorite system makes you sit idle and wait for the applications to launch and files to get downloaded? If you have all these woes, then it’s certain that your Mac needs maintenance and timely cleanups. Most of the time, a simple restart of the system will do the trick. However, if your hard drive has loads of applications installed and files cluttered up all over the place, then you need to follow a few tips to help speed up things on your Mac:

Take a Peek into ‘Login Items’ folder:

You will find certain applications in your system that automatically start up every time you log in to your account. You can check for these applications in the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items and decide on what programs you use every so often. In order to accelerate your performance, you should remove all the unwanted items from this list.

Free up Hard Disk Space:

The free space on your Mac hard disk is used as a virtual memory for running system processes. Hence, you should recover your disk space by removing all the unnecessary applications, language packs, universal binaries and other useless stuff existing on the drive. For applications, you can switch to the ‘Applications’ folder at the root of your Macintosh HD and uninstall all the bulky and infrequently-used applications from there.

Clean Up the Mac Desktop:

If your Mac desktop is untidy and has hundreds of icons, you will face serious performance issues. Every desktop icon is assumed to be a separate window in Mac. This results in small frequent memory hits that might lead to a major Mac slowdown. To keep your Mac healthy and well-tuned, you should organize all files and folders on your messy desktop.

Take a Glance at Your Activity Monitor:

You should regularly keep an eye on the Activity Monitor to find out which applications are using more resources, i.e. CPU and RAM. If you can do without having these applications in your system, you will experience dramatic changes in your performance.

There is abundance of  third-party Mac cleanup tools in the market today. These software optimize your Mac performance by allowing you to easily remove unwanted files, caches, logs, system junks, applications, and universal binaries from your system. Further, they support the latest Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.