A simple but effective Mac speed-up tip

Wed, Nov 23 '05 at 06:46AM
from: RandyMan

Here's a tip I was made aware of recently that I thought I'd share (though I'd like to take credit, I must give that to some Smart Friends of mine); it'll help speed up your Mac, and may reduce the appearance of the SPOD (the rainbow cursor). It's not a hack, and there are no modifications necessary to any of your software; there's nothing to download, and there's a fringe benefit (subjectively speaking, of course) of cleaning up your Desktop.



The tip: Reduce the number of icons on your Desktop!



That's it. Really. No, really, try it and see. If you only reduce it by a few, you probably won't notice much of a difference, but the more you remove, the snappier it will feel (dependent on your machine, of course).



Why? Well, every icon on your Desktop is a little window, and as such, has a corresponding backing store allocation in the window server. Lots of these little windows apparently can put a strain on the window server, especially when you've got lots of other (normal) windows open as well.



Don't believe me? Well, you can see for yourself, by running Quartz Debug found in /Developer -> Applications -> Performance Tools (assuming you have the Developer Tools installed -- you do have the Developer Tools installed, don't you?). Show the window list (Tools -> Show Window List), order by Application, and click on the various Finder entries to highlight each "window." You'll soon see that each desktop icon is treated as its very own window. See, I told you so.



No no, no applause necessary, cash donations will suffice...

So does this work?

You seem to have a few icons on your desktop

I cleaned off about half of my desktop icons, and it does seem to work. (I'm down to only 37 icons.) I'm going to try to do a serious cleanup/trashing job tomorrow and see what happens.

Does this also apply to the icons in the sidebar of new Finder windows? - or only those actually on the desktop. I'm getting real comfy with the ease of using the sidebar.

I don't think it applies to sidebar icons, but if you are really loading it up, you might want to take a look at something like DragThing. I have one dock that has 7 layers to it. It's hidden so that only the layer tabs show, but it will pop up with the right layer showing just by moving my cursor to the desired tab. I can access any document or application without opening a new finder window with just a single click.