Defragment your hard drive
As files are saved to your hard drive, they are written on the hard drive one after another (in a spiral pattern, like songs on an LP record). But as files are deleted, gaps are opened up. Then new files can be written into those gaps. But since the new files are not exactly the same size as the gaps, some files are broken up into several pieces to fit into the available spaces. Your Mac must then keep track of the location of all those separate pieces of a file in order to put the whole file back together when it is needed.
As more and more files are written and deleted, your hard drive becomes a complex patchwork of file fragments and bits of empty space and the data file that stores all of the locations of file fragments becomes huge. This slows down all operations as the computer seeks for file fragments all over the hard drive. Defragmentation puts all of these file fragments back together
into whole files and moves all of the empty space to the end. In addition, System files are moved to the fastest access part of the hard drive.
This cannot be done with Apple System software, you must have Norton Utilities, MacTools or a similar commercial utilities program. You should defragment every 3-4 months — more often if you frequently write and delete large numbers of files.
