There are many tips you’ll need in order to use your Mac more efficiently, regardless of your experience. Some of these will require recent versions of the Mac operating system (OS) such as the latest macOS Sierra – but not all of them do. (select any image to enlarge)
Change which app a file is opened with
If you want a file to open in an app other than its default, select the file and press Command+I, to show its information. In the "Open with:" section, use the drop-down menu to choose a new app.If you just close the window here, that change will only be applied to that one file; if you want other files of that type to use that same app, click "Change All…" beneath the drop-down menu.
Have things ready at log-in
If there are certain apps that you'll always want to have open when you start up your Mac, you can set this up in System Preferences. Go to Users, make sure your user account is highlighted, then click Login Items.Click the + and you can choose an application, file server or pretty much anything else that should open when you log in. Once you've added something, you can use the checkboxes to opt to hide it, though it will still be running in the background.
Having lots of these set up can make your Mac slower to start up, though, so if you need to speed things up and temporarily don't need them running, hold Shift while OS X or macOS is logging you in to suppress them.
See your Mac activity with Activity Monitor
If you find your Mac is running slow, or the fans are kicking in when you don't appear to be doing anything too intensive, you can see if you can identify what's causing it. Activity Monitor in OS X and macOS shows you how your Mac's resources are being used.Launch Activity Monitor from the Utilities folder to see current processes, and the resources they take up. The columns show you things such as the CPU usage of a process or the RAM it's taking up. If there's a process that's hogging resources and you're confident it's not needed, you can end it by selecting it, then clicking Quit Process.
If you're just curious about how system resources are being used, click the tabs (CPU, System Memory and so on) to see graphs of your usage over time.
Back up your Mac
Okay, so we know that people haven't actually forgotten they can back up with their Mac, but we also know that so many people don't bother. Please do! Ever since OS X 10.5 Apple has made it easy to back up using Time Machine. Ideally you should be doing other things to back up as well, but at least do Time Machine. You can pick up a 2TB external drive for less than $90.Partition external hard drives in Disk Utility
One little known fact about Macs is that they use a different file system than Windows computers by default. That means, if you’re planning on sharing an external hard drive between both Microsoft’s and Apple’s operating systems, you have a few options. While you could format the hard drive to take advantage of the exFAT file system, you would thereby miss out on faster write times.Luckily, in the Disk Utility app featured in macOS, there’s the option to partition hard drives. In doing so, you can theoretically divide the hard drive in half, with one volume being dedicated to macOS and the other to Windows. Take the hard drive over to your PC and you can format one of those volumes for NTFS, making it the perfect little hybrid device.
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Credit: techradar.com
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