Close Applications Any application icon in the Dock that has a small white dot or line next to it or under it is still open. Just click and hold on the application icon in the Dock and in the pop-up menu, select Quit. If you see Force Quit in that pop-up, be aware that this application is “not responding” at the moment and is probably one of the causes of your machine being slow.

You may not need to Force Quit though. Click on the application icon in the Dock and wait for it to become the active application. When you see the name of the application in the menu bar, click on it and choose Quit from the drop down.

The biggest culprits are third-party applications like Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver), and Firefox. They are not necessarily optimized for OS X, and use more memory and resources than Apple applications. If you are running multiple third-party applications at the same time on an older computer (i.e. Word and Excel, or Photoshop and PowerPoint), this can cause major slowdowns in processing. Another thing to watch out for is too many websites open in multiple tabs within your web browser.

Did you know that every open tab or website is taking up precious memory that could be used for current processing, even if you are not currently looking at them? As I write this article and listen to a webcast in the background, Safari is holding on to over 1 GB of my 8 GBs of memory in my MacBook Pro, and I am not even looking at any websites. A screen capture of my activity monitor 2. Restarting or shutting down is always the first thing to try when you have any problems with your computer. As we open and close applications and documents, your computer’s memory gets “crowded” or “dirty.” You can think of this as digital residue left behind. A reboot or a shutdown will clear memory and reset your Mac’s resources.

Click on the Apple Menu in the top left corner of your menu bar and select either Restart or Shutdown from the drop down.* *It is always a good idea to allow OS X to control the restart or shutdown. Only hold down the power button to force it to shutdown if your machine is completely locked up or not responding.

Solutions to Microsoft Word Not Opening or Responding. Option 1: There might be multiple reasons why your Word application is not opening. If the problem is specific to a word document and everything else is working fine, then follow the steps below: Step 1: Open Microsoft word and create a blank word document from the template.

Repair Permissions Your Mac is actually running two operating systems behind the scenes, OS X and UNIX. A Permission Repair will allow OS X to re-index all permissions being held by the UNIX sublayer (no, you don’t need to understand what that means). Once these two layers are back on the same page, you will not be sitting around watching a spinning rainbow pinwheel nearly as much. Visual studio professional for mac. Use the Spotlight search on the right side of your Menu Bar by clicking on the magnifying glass icon. Type in “Disk,” then click on Disk Utility once it shows up. Select your Macintosh HD in the left column. Make sure you are on the First Aid tab and click the Repair Disk Permissions button (there is little need to Verify Permissions since you will always improve your situation by doing a Repair anyway).