Tips to speedup slow iPhone

Good reasons as to why iPhone 4S or 4 is running slow?

iPhone is a hand-held device, a little computer that fits in your pocket. Just like a computer can slow down due to some reasons, similarly iPhone too can slow down. A slow iPhone is such a pain that it can make any user fume into frustration. Below are some valid reasons or slow iPhone:

• Too many apps can easily slow down an iPhone. Some apps are buggy and don’t function as they should function.
• Some apps may consume more than enough amount of iPhone RAM causing the device to crawl.
• Messages with large attachments are another reason that eats memory of an iPhone. 
• iPhone stores captured photos on two locations i.e. Camera Roll & iPhoto. This can take good amount of memory. 
• A latest upgrade on iPhone particularly iOS 7 on iPhone 4 may slow down the device.
• Too many apps running in the background causes slow iPhone.
• An older iPhone is more prone to slowness may be due to over usage. 

How to speedup slow iPhone or an older iPhone?

1. Deleted unwanted messages: You may have tons of unwanted message, most of them ads, so it is good to select them all and trash them.
2. Clear Safari Data: Enter Settings<<Safari to Clear History & Clear Cookies and Data.
3. Close running Apps: Closing running apps in the background help device gather its resources. Double Tap the Home Button to bring forth idle apps. Select them and close one-by-one.
4. Delete Mail Attachments: Delete unnecessary mail attachments since they kill useful spaces on iPhone.
5. Delete Photos: As mentioned earlier, your photos are saved in iPhoto & Camera Roll. This can occupy huge drive spaces. It is good to delete them off Camera Roll. 
6. Hard Restart: Allow your iPhone to have a hard restart. Do it by holding down the top lock key and home screen button until the device shuts down.
7. iPhone Reset: If all tips fails to speedup an iPhone, then you may choose to reset your device. In many cases, Reset alone solves the slow issues on an iPhone device. 

Caution: The above tips are helpful to speedup a slow or old iPhone. Though, writer would recommend user to double check an app, attachment or photos, which are to be deleted. You may end up loosing some important data (iMessages, notes, bookmarks etc.) while trying to delete junk files.

• Stellar Phoenix Data Recovery for iOS
• Leawo iOS data recovery

In case you end up losing some needed files from an iPhone, above apps can help save the day for you.

Magical working of Tags in Mavericks

Magical working of Tags in Mavericks

Tags in Mavericks are a smarter option for managing the files and folders. Organising thousands of folders and files becomes an easy task with the help of such facility. Existing files can be chosen by clicking on the tag accordingly. Moreover, searching and sorting task will become uncomplicated and we would be able to navigate according to our convenience.

Generating Tag preferences

Using Tag preferences, we can select the different names, colors etc. of our choice. Just select Preferences option from Finder and press Tags button. User can change the order of tag by clicking and dragging the dot tag according to their preferences. Also one can rename the tag and give it a unique name by just clicking on it. There are some certain tags that appear in the File menu and Shortcut menus of the Finder. The user can simply drag the Favourite tag and replace it with the new tag of his own choice. Now comes the inactive tag, which are invisible tags. They can't be seen in the sidebar but we can definitely add them according to our convenience. For example, Hyphen indicate a new tag whereas checkmark denotes that the current tag is available in the sidebar. And the tags can still be used after unchecking on it but will not appear in the sidebar of Finder and dialog window.

Operating Tags

Tags in Mavericks present in different colours i.e. red, blue, pink etc. There are many options available for using the tag. So let us see the different scenarios of tagging the document, files or folders:

1) Using Right-click on Finder option:

Tags can be accessed from the file menu available in Finder bar. Seven colours can be seen by default by clicking on Finder menu. Just right click on the file that you want to tag and scroll down the mouse to choose from the colourful tags options. And if you want to delete the tag, just click on the existing tag and press delete key. In case you want to click on certain files together then just hold Command key and select various files. Then follow the same procedure as well.

2) Using tag from the File menu

You may also select the required tag colour from the window on which you are working directly. For doing so, one needs to go to the File menu in the same window in which you are working and then apply the tag from there.

3) Using iCloud shortcut to tag documents

Some applications such as Apple's TextEdit support iCloud. Once the iCloud set up is there, saving and managing the documents becomes easier. Now applying tags to the document while saving consumes time and effort. Now you could able to see the small triangle that appears just after the document's name in the window title bar. Click on that icon and apply the tag in the Tags field.

4) Using tag shortcut

When we have to manage large number of files, it become a tedious task to deal with it. So creating a shortcut in such a situation will make the task quite easier. Here we require the keyboard shortcut to perform this task. First launch System preferences to select the keyboard preference. After choosing, click on the shortcuts tab. A window will appear with the option App Shortcuts, just select it and then click the + sign button available near the bottom of the window. Now choose Finder in the application field, write tags in Menu title and write a keyboard shortcut of your choice. After filling the required field, click on Add and the task is done. Now whenever you select the file or folder in the Finder, just press the keyboard shortcut to perform the operation.

Therefore, above is the interesting usage of tags explained, which literate us the smarter handling of files and folders without any complications and difficulties.

How to speedup an old iMac?

Buying older Macs have been great subject of discussions over the web. There are plenty of online platforms which sell used Mac computers to people willing to buy. Among the best known sites that offer good deals are:

• Amazon
• eBay
• Mac of all trades
• The Mac Store

With such shopping sites, buying an old Mac is same as buying a new one. One puts a lot of research & fact-findings to seal the deal. However, it is quite frequent that used Macs may not perform up to expectations of the user. After buying such an old iMac, one may add RAM, SSD or HDD and other additional hardware to match the speed like a new one.

Find the reasons of slow iMac:

Check RAM size. Go to Apple Logo and click ‘About this Mac’. Further Click More Info<<Memory. The Apple will let you know the RAM it has. If the old iMac had 2GB of RAM, then it is advisable to upgrade it to at-least 4GB for quick execution of the OS X tasks. iMacs love RAMs so they won’t mind even 8GB or more, however, a RAM update has to be aligned with the system specification of the iMac. Sometimes, an overdose of RAM may not be digested by a system.

Format Hard Drive: When you have received your iMac through reseller, it is advisable to format the drive & reinstall an OS X. You might go for latest OS X Mavericks after confirming that iMac model will be compatible with OS X 10.9. Check here for system compatibility with OS X Mavericks http://www.apple.com/osx/how-to-upgrade/

Activity Monitor: If might be that you still be crawling on the iMac even after RAM & Hard drive updates. Under this situation, it is good to closely watch Activity Monitor so that one can know the memory consumption by several apps & programs. If you find any default app using too much of RAM, then one can take preventive measure against it.

Disk Repair: Through Disk Utility, Verify/Repair Disk permissions. Older hard drive is more prone to logical corruption. Even a minor corruption on the disk may cause the entire OS X to crawl. Moreover, it will also fail the efforts of speeding up the iMac through various other resources like RAM etc.

So, above factors are simple to implement and they will definitely resolve the slow speedup of iMac. However, under some conditions, one may has to opt for advance level of optimization.

Hard drive fragmentation: A purchased iMac as old as 2-5 years may have developed colony of fragments on its drive. It is more common when you have no idea about the history of the purchased old iMac. It might have been that, iMac was used to run heavy software including Video-Editing, Animations etc. The development of fragmentation is most common when OS X runs large applications. OS X itself handles fragmentation on a file which is less than or equals to 20MB. When user works on bulky software, the files created on the drive are more than the mentioned size (20GB) and thus drive develops fragmentation. With more & more fragments adding to the drive, the OS X will begin to crawl in order to access files from various drive locations. 

Tips to remove fragmentation:

• Arrange a larger external drive and format it with HFS partition using Disk Utility. Now transfer all data to this external hard drive. Re-format the Mac hard drive and install fresh OS X on it. Now copy backs all the files & folders from the external hard drive to OS X drive. This will help reduce no. of fragments and thus improves the speed of OS X.

• Use a third-party defrag Mac app to remove fragmentations. To find best defrag Mac App click here.

• Once fragments are taken care of, user will experience a boost in the performance of the OS X, since the OS X is accessing file information through contiguous memory locations.

Failing hard drive:

When the drive is not fragmented but still acts wei

rdly slow, then it is recommended to cross check the stability of the drive.

• Repair the hard drive using a professional Mac volume optimizer. The disk utility may not be able to repair all corruption on the disk. To find a dedicated disk repair Mac software click here.

• Replace the hard drive with a new one. This also proves to work. User must find out an appropriate replacement for their iMac. Drive Replacement will cause an immediate impact on the speed & performance of the old iMac.

Secure Wipe Mac hard drive using easy tips

Introduction of wiping data:

Wiping data from the hard disk refers to the context of overwriting the data with zeros or random characters thus rendering it illegible to read. According to the dictionary knowledge wiping is the synonym of deleting but actually deleting the data means removing the data from the file listing and not from the computer. So wiping is a technique, which uses certain algorithms to permanently erase, the hard drive data from the computer, which cannot be recovered later.

Why wipe data from Mac hard drive:

Before handing the used hard drive to another person or giving away your Mac, it is very important to delete the confidential and personal files so that nobody is able to retrieve the data afterwards. Formatting the disk will not accomplish the task of deleting the actual data from the Mac computer or hard drive. Same with using ‘emptying trash’ command, which only removes the data from the OS X but doesn’t wipe it from its original location. Data shredding is needed for the security transaction of the hard drive to any other stranger.

Benefits of wiping data from Mac disk:

=> Permanently erase the Hard drive data.

=> Completely erase all system entries, log files and all sensitive information created by the OS.

=> Wiping will lead to ensure free spaces.

=> Data is securely wiped and finally didn't leave any traces.

Wipe Using OS X Secure Wipe Mac:

Eradicating credit card information, chats, Banking passwords, financial information, personal files is not enough with the action of removing the data from trash simply. Making the confidential information inaccessible in Mac computers require the certain steps to follow:

'Secure Empty Trash'feature: First of all there should be one file or folder in the trash to make the option of 'Secure Empty Trash' available. Then just press-hold the Command button on trash icon present on the dock to ensure the visibility of the option. Right click on the required option will overwrite the data ultimately resulting in unreadable files or folders. Also another way to access this option is from the Finder menu. This is a knowledgeable practice to securely erase the files & folders residing in trash.

To secure wipe Mac partition:

=> Launch Disk Utility and then select the hard drive that you want to erase.

=> Clicking on the erase tab will ask to choose one of the security options button. => The four security options are:

1. Nothing
2. Zero out data
3. 3-Pass Erase
4. 7-Pass Erase.

First option is not to erase any data. Zero out data will overwrite the data once. Since the more overwrite is there, the maximum data security is maintained. So 3-Pass will take three times longer to overwrite the data whereas 7-Pass erase will take seven times longer to do this task effectively. The criteria of choosing the desired level depend on the data.

Wipe Mac Startup Disk using wiping software:

Here comes the one of the efficient and tested software Stellar Wipe Macwhich uses powerful algorithms to permanently erase the data. This software has the tendency to wipe the entire hard drive in a single go. With this outstanding utility, it not only wipes away the system entries, log files but erase unwanted system traces also which eat up drive space. It can wipe multiple drives simultaneously and can also schedule the process as well. Generally this software helps to delete browsing information, instant messaging information, hard drive data or any other confidential data permanently. This powerful software ensures guaranteed operations with the proven results. So steps to wipe Mac startup disk are:

1. Create a bootable DVD with the software.
2. Restart Mac and press OPTION key to load boot menu. Select Boot DVD.
3. Select main HDD and choose a wiping algorithm to secure erase Mac startup disk.

Conclusion:

Always choose the safer side and security in case of data because data is the valuable asset to perform a major operation. And with this, while selling away the Mac computer or hard drive or iPhone or tablets, ensure the data is wiped completely with the zero possibility of recovery chances.