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That setting makes interface elements more obvious than the default appearance by darkening text and drawing borders around some of the buttons. Oh, and while it’s unrelated to system performance, overall usability and your personal performance in OS X Yosemite may be improved by enabling the Increase Contrast option while in that same Accessibility panel. Ditch the eye candy, it offers a significant speed difference on some machines. It’s hard to overemphasize this one if you’re only going to make a single adjustment to Yosemite to boost performance on an older Mac, this should be it. Presumably the newest Macs won’t notice this however, but if you don’t like transparency you can always turn it off anyway.
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This single settings change made a considerable difference in the responsiveness and speed of opening folders and windows in OS X Yosemite on an older MacBook Air (you can actually see the difference by watching SystemUIServer and Finder in Activity Monitor while opening and dragging around a transparent window, before and after the setting has been changed).
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Choose ‘Display’ (it’s usually the default panel to open) and check the box for “Reduce Transparency”.Head to the Apple menu and in System Preferences go to “Accessibility”.For beefy Macs and the newest models, there is more than enough power onboard to handle the eye candy effects of Yosemite, but for older Macs, those effects can give the appearance of a slower computer (at least when a window is being drawn or moved around). 1: Disable The Eye Candy Transparent Windows & EffectsĮye candy like transparent menus, windows, and titlebars requires processor power and memory to render. If you feel like OS X and your Mac is running slower since updating to Yosemite, follow these instructions to toggle a few settings to disable some of the possible causes of slowdowns, do a quick check on processor activity, and you should get things right up to speed again.
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