Word and Excel, or Photoshop and PowerPoint), this can cause major slowdowns in processing.Īnother thing to watch out for is too many websites open in multiple tabs within your web browser. If you are running multiple third-party applications at the same time on an older computer (i.e.

They are not necessarily optimized for OS X, and use more memory and resources than Apple applications. The biggest culprits are third-party applications like Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver), and Firefox. When you see the name of the application in the menu bar, click on it and choose Quit from the drop down. Click on the application icon in the Dock and wait for it to become the active application. 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. Just click and hold on the application icon in the Dock and in the pop-up menu, select Quit. Any application icon in the Dock that has a small white dot or line next to it or under it is still open.