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ChrisWrites.com
  • How-To
  • Latest News
  • Mac OS X
  • Safari
  • iTunes
  • iOS
ChrisWrites.com
  • How-To
  • Latest News
  • Mac OS X
  • Safari
  • iTunes
  • iOS
How-To

Boost your Mac’s performance: What apps and processes are running?

11:48 am
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Jessica Thornsby
3 Min Read

With Macs getting more and more powerful all the time, it’s becoming far too easy to minimise an application window, and then forget about it – but the apps, processes and software that’s running on your Mac has a huge impact on your laptop’s overall performance.

Even if you haven’t noticed a drop in your Mac’s speed, or how long a single charge cycle lasts, closing unnecessary software and processes will improve your Mac’s overall performance.

In this article, I’ll look at the different ways that you can take stock of exactly what’s running on your Mac, and how to boost your Mac’s performance by closing all the apps, processes, and other miscellaneous software that you don’t currently need.


Force Quit

The Force Quit menu is of the quickest and easiest ways to see all the applications that are currently running on your Mac.

To display this menu, either:

  • Select the ‘Apple’ logo from your Mac’s menu bar, followed by ‘Force Quit.’
  • Use the ‘Command + Alt + Escape’ keyboard shortcut.

This menu displays a list of all the applications that are running on your Mac. You can quit these applications normally, by bringing the app into the foreground and then closing the application window. Alternatively, you can force the app to close by selecting it in the Force Quit window, and then clicking the ‘Force Quit’ button. Note that when you force quit an application, you’ll typically lose any unsaved work.

Activity Monitor

The Force Quit menu may be the easiest way to check what’s running on your Mac, but it only lists traditional apps that run in application windows. If you want to see everything that’s running on your Mac, then you’ll need to dig a little deeper, and use the Activity Monitor.

To launch the Activity Monitor app, navigate to ‘Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor.’ By default, Activity Monitor lists all currently-running applications and processes in alphabetical order, but you can also organise these items based on other factors, such as CPU load, by clicking the different category headers.

To quit any application or process, select it in the Activity Monitor and then click the little ‘Quit’ button in the window’s upper-left corner. Just make sure you thoroughly understand what a process does, before you force it to close, as quitting a crucial system process can result in some strange behaviour. If in doubt, then entering the processes’ name into your favourite Internet search engine will usually bring up all the information you need to make an informed decision about whether it’s safe to quit this particular process.

Are too many apps launching at startup?

If you’re concerned about the number of apps that are running on your Mac, then it’s also worth taking stock of the applications that are set to launch at startup.

Removing the startup privileges from one or more applications, is one of the most effective ways of gaining control over the number of apps that are running on your Mac.

  • Select the ‘Apple’ logo from your Mac’s menu bar.
  • Navigate to ‘System Preferences… > Users and Groups.’
  • Click the little padlock icon in the bottom-left corner, enter your admin password and then click ‘Unlock.’
  • In the left-hand menu, select your user account.
  • Click the ‘Login items’ tab.

This window lists all the applications that are set to launch at startup. To prevent an application from launching automatically, select it from the list and then give the little ‘-’ button a click.

Before you go

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

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Tagsactivity monitor force quit launch at startup login items Mac macos processes

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About the author

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Jessica Thornsby

Jessica Thornsby is a technical writer based in Sheffield. She writes about Android, Java, Kotlin and all things Apple. She is the co-author of O'Reilly's "iWork: The Missing Manual," and the author of "Android UI Design," from Packt Publishing.

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