Running El Cap on a Mac mini 2009 with an SSD, which is the same core hardware as the MacBook. Runs well for a 6+ year old machine. Mavericks and Yosemite beachballed quite badly on the original mechanical hard drive, the £50 SSD upgrade was worth every penny. If your Mac isn't listed above, and it was released before June 13, 2016, it isn't compatible with OS X El Capitan (10.11). OS X El Capitan Features Compatibility All of the above Macs support the operating system interface refinements as well as the updated Safari, Mail, Notes, and Spotlight applications.
You probably noticed that after you upgraded to OS X El Capitan, slow Mac started to become a trouble. Why does this happen? Well, we found out that El Capitan needs a lot more disk space and RAM to run quickly. The good news is, it's not just possible to speed up El Capitan — it's pretty simple.
The easiest way to get a faster Mac with El Capitan is to get a Mac cleaner. You can download CleanMyMac X for free and simply let the app do everything for you. Speeding up El Capitan with it will only take a few minutes. But if you want to do it manually, read on.
Go over each step to speed up El Capitan system.
1.Speed up your Mac's startup
It starts at the very beginning. When you turn your Mac on, it typically launches a dozen apps at once. And you probably don't need most of them at that moment. This could be one of the reasons El Capitan running slow. To stop them from launching on startup, go to System Preferences, choose Users & Groups and then click your username. Check the unnecessary apps and click.
Don't worry, if you accidentally remove something useful, just add it back by clicking and choosing it from the Applications folder.
2.Major hard drive cleaning
One of the reasons a Mac gets slow is a full hard drive. To find out how cluttered yours is, click on the main Apple menu in the top left corner and choose About This Mac > Storage. If you see the top bar getting full, like in the screenshot below, it's time to clean up some space.
It might take a while, so here's a piece of advice on how to approach it.
- Arrange your files and folders by size to find the biggest.
To do it: open Finder, click on All My Files in the left menu bar (if you don't see it there, press Command+Shift+F (?+?+F), and then click View in the top menu bar and select Show View Options. Now choose Sort by Size and Arrange by Size. Now all your files are arranged from the biggest to the smallest. - Arrange your files and folders by date.
If you'd like to arrange them by date to find files you haven't opened in a while (maybe you forgot they were even there!), you can do this by following the steps above, and then changing arrange by Size, to arrange by Date Last Opened. Now click on Date Last Opened in the name of the column and you get a list starting with the oldest files you have.
Don't forget to look at the file type distribution in the Storage tab. It might give you a hint on the folders that occupy the most space and need cleaning.
This process takes a while because your Mac can't arrange files by both size and date at once. However, there are apps that can, such as CleanMyMac X . It has a special module that looks exactly for large and old files and sorts them for you. You can delete the files you don't need directly from the app in just a few clicks.
3. Trim down your system
Trimming down your system includes cleaning cache and temporary files, and flushing DNS.
Cleaning cache files on El Capitan
- Open a Finder window and select “Go to Folder” in the Go menu, at the top of the screen.
- Type in ~/Library/Caches and hit “enter” to proceed to this folder. Important: remove the insides of these folders, but not the folders themselves.
- Repeat 1 and 2, but replace ~/Library/Caches with /Library/Caches (simply lose the ~ symbol).
- Restart your Mac. Yes, it's kind of a pain.
It's also much easier (and faster) with an app, you can take a look at how to clean caches on Mac OS X.
Flush DNS cache on OS X 10.11
When you flush the DNS cache, what you're doing is removing old cache entries that translate internet domain names (example.com) into IP addresses. You're going to need the Terminal for this. To open Terminal, open Spotlight and type in Terminal, or find it by clicking on the Applications folder and then clicking on Utilities.
Once launched, type in:
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache;sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder;say cache flushed
You'll need to enter the admin password to execute the command.
4. Free up memory
Usually Macs are pretty handy with memory management, but sometimes you just have to give them a direction. Check out your memory usage in the Activity Monitor (find it with Spotlight) by clicking on the Memory tab.
If Physical Memory and Memory Used have nearly equal values, it means your Mac will start using Virtual Memory soon. Virtual Memory relies on your Mac's hard drive and is so slow that you don't want to get it involved. When you start running out of memory, just clean it manually with Terminal.
Open it as explained in the Step 3. Then, once opened, type in:
sudo purge
Give your system a moment to process the command.
If you don't want to use the Activity Monitor or Terminal commands each time you need to free up some RAM, you can download CleanMyMac X and do it with just one click instead. After downloading CleanMyMac X, freeing up memory is… Well, free.
5. Use CleanMyMac X
You can go over each step to speed up El Capitan, or you can keep it fast with CleanMyMac X.
It will save you hours wasted on painfully boring tasks of searching and deleting useless files. With CleanMyMac X, you can clean your hard drive and system, run maintenance scripts, clear caches and histories, uninstall apps, and remove unused extensions — all from one place.
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There are two recommended installation methods for El Capitan download and install on your Mac PC or Laptop recommended by the Apple. Before use those installation methods you should need to have free space (around 12 GB) on your drive for keeping the installation files when installation is processing. If you do not have free space available on your drive, please use some cleaning software to clean up the drive to remove junk files and unnecessary application data and folders from the drive.
Then you must keep a backup of your previous file, folders, and applications before upgrading the El Capitan download installation. You can use a clone backup tool for backing up your Mac PC or laptop.
Install El Capitan Download On Empty Volume
In this method, you will be installing the Mac OS X El Capitan on an empty drive. The volume doesn’t have any files, folders or applications. There is no any startup volume on your PC when you are going to clean install El Capitan. So you can easily use the El Capitan installer to install the OS X into the clean empty volume.
Office For Mac El Capitan
Install El Capitan On The Startup Volume
In this method, you will be installing the OS X on your existing startup volume. Here you need to keep a backup of your data stored on the existing startup volume. For install the El Capitan on your startup volume, you need to create a bootable USB installer on a separate drive (USB pen drive).
Keep A Backup For El Capitan Download Before Installing.
You need to choose a good backup tool for backing up the existing OS’ files, folders, and applications. There are many tools and applications available on the internet for backing up the Mac OS X El Capitan download.
Apple El Capitan Download
You can check whether the created bootable drive is working properly by checking system preferences and selecting the startup disk pane and booting the backed up drive.
How To Create A Bootable Installer To Install El Capitan Download
Apple Mac Apps store allows you to El Capitan installer directly. All you need to do is navigate through the Mac Apps store and find the appropriate link to El Capitan download. Next, you need to do is to create a bootable USB installer. Before you do this step please keep more than 12 GB of free volume space to create the bootable USB installer.
Then Follow The Steps That Mentioned Below.
First of all, you need to plug in the USB drive to your Mac PC or laptop. Here you should use a second internal volume for installing the files. Then open the terminal by searching the search bar and type the command createinstallmedia and enter. As soon as you enter the above command, the system will identify the USB drive which is plug in on it. After the recognizing, the system will begin to store the El Capitan installer files on the USB. After a few minutes, the system creates a bootable USB drive that has the El Capitan installer.
Enter the following path to the terminal
/Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmediaHere the El Capitan installer must be in the application folder to do this step.
Demo: -
In this example, the El Capitan installer in the application folder and Myusb is the name of USB drive which is used to boot.
sudo /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/MyVolume --applicationpath /Applications/Install OS X El Capitan.appEl Capitan Compatible Devices
iMac, Mac Book, 13 inch Mac Book Pro, Mac Book Retina Models, 17 inch Mac Book Pro, Mac Book Black and White, Xserve – 2009, 15 inch Mac Book Pro, Mac Mini, Mac Book Air, Mac Pro
System Requirements For El Capitan Download
OS X v10.6.8 or later, 2GB memory, 8.8GB storage