Whether you’re running OS X 10.5 or the much faster Snow leopard OS X 10.6, there’s quite a bit you can do to further speed up you OS X-based systems. This is specially for those people whose Mac Books and IMacs have become slower over time. Many of these tricks will garner a lot of speed out of older Macs, especially Panther and Leopard, although smaller speed benefits under Snow Leopard will also be noticed.

Disable dashboard widgets:
While widgets are fun, and a funky way to attain information at a button press, each dashboard widget you enable, consumes both processing power and valuable memory. To disable widgets and speed up OS X you need to: open up terminal.app located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal. alternatively you can “Terminals” in spot light to open it. Select, then copy/paste the following into the terminal and hit Enter: < defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled-boolean YES > (without cascades). Then type the following: . Hit Enter again, and your Dashboard widgets are now disabled.

Here’s a simple one:
If you’re the type that has a mess of files on your desktop, simply organizing them and putting them into folders makes a huge difference. Since OS X has a visually rich interface and this implies to desktop icons as well, simply putting them into appropriate folders will do wonders, particularly for older Mac systems and those with less than 2GB of memory.