Year-End Best Practices To Keep Your Mac In Top Shape

Like any other gadgets you own, your Mac would require regular maintenance to run optimally. Apart from the monthly and quarterly care routine, you need to go the extra mile with year-end maintenance to ensure that your system is all set for taking up the challenges of work in the upcoming year. Most of the measures are something you can manage on your own, without professional help. Here is a simple list of year-end best practices that you can employ to keep your Mac in top shape.

Remove all unnecessary applications

First things first, start the New Year with a comprehensive review of the applications you may have installed on your Mac through the year. It is normal to have several unnecessary programs on a system over time. However, these unused and redundant apps often end up loading services at startup and consuming system resources even when not in use. They can also eat disk space which is otherwise required for other programs and files. So it makes sense to get rid of them to prepare your Mac for a fresh start for the coming year. There are several options you can use for reviewing and removing the unneeded applications. While you can do it manually, there are some tools that can get things sorted out quickly.

Eliminate clutter from the system

After doing away with the unnecessary applications, you should go ahead and eliminate the unnecessary files as well. Decluttering is an ideal way to revamp your Mac with better speed and performance as your work needs are most likely to increase with time. Again, you can do it manually or use tools such as clean my mac to eliminate the useless files with just a few clicks and without any efforts. However, decluttering is always to be done with great care because you cannot recover the files that are deleted permanently. Before you remove the files from the system for good, double-check them to make sure that you wouldn’t need them in the future.

Update the OS and applications

While clearing the unnecessary applications and files from your Mac can enhance its performance, you need to secure it on the security front at the end of the year. The final step of your year-end housekeeping is to secure your Mac with the current program updates and security fixes. Apple brings security patches and performance fixes at regular intervals while software manufacturers also come up with periodic application enhancements. You will need to install or update the versions manually unless your Mac is set to download and install updates automatically.

The best thing about these year-end maintenance steps is that you can handle these by yourself, manually or with the help of some easy-to-use tools. You don’t even need professional help to complete most of them, unless there is a major issue with your Mac. So it makes sense to have a checklist ready well in time and take these simple measures at the end of the year.