Speed Up Applications by Increasing Memory

What This Will Do For Your Mac: Applications may run faster when you increase the memory that is allocated for them. This can also make applications more stable and cause them to crash less often. The more physical ram you have, the higher you can bump up the memory of your applications. The higher you bump up the memory, the faster the application runs.

How to Do It: 1) Make sure that the application you want to speed up is not running. Open the folder where the application you want to speed up is located by double clicking on the folder.

2) Click ONCE on the application you want to speed up. Make sure that the application's icon is highlighted as shown here.

3) Click and hold the 'File' menu on the menu bar. Drag the mouse pointer down to 'Get Info' as shown here.

4) A window titled 'Get Info' should pop up on your screen as shown here. In the boxes titled 'Minimum size' and 'Preferred size', bump the number up a couple thousand. Remember that the preferred size must be larger than the minimum size. You can bump it up more if you'd like too, but you are limited by the amount of physical ram (or virtual ram) you have. Performance increases only up to a certain point. Do your Mac a favor and bump up the minumum size up a little on your favorite applications!


5) Make sure that all the settings are the way that you want them. Close the 'Get Info' window.

6) Double click the application to open it. Work in the application for a few minutes and test it out. If you think it should be a little faster, go through the steps again and bump the memory up a little more. If you are satisfied with the speed increase, you're finished!

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Created by: Michelle Moore
East Buchanan Community School Tech Team
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