Well, as it turns out, you can: according to our lab tests (see “Bang for Your RAM Buck”, going from 256MB to 512MB will give most users a substantial speed boost, but going from 512MB to 1GB won’t do as much. Conventional wisdom says you can never have enough RAM. See “34 Software Speedups” to find out how to speed up Apple Safari, iTunes, and iPhoto Mozilla Firefox Microsoft Office and more. To make them-and your system as a whole-feel more responsive.

(For a few suggestions about what youĭo, see “Top OS X Tips”.) But you can tweak individual There’s only so much you can do to make OS X itself faster. Add these tweaks all together, and your system will indeed feel snappier. But like a mechanic tightening this and loosening that, you can do lots of little things that will speed up your Mac just a bit.

So there aren’t many single things you can do to make your Mac dramatically faster. Apple does a pretty good job of making sure your Mac’s performance is well tuned right out of the box.