Any tips to speed up a 2010 MacBook Air running Yosemite?

[saintforlife]

I have a 13" 2010 MBA (1.86/4GB/128GB). The machine is starting to show its age. Everything has slowed down a bit. Start up, shut down, opening apps etc. all take a few extra seconds. I hardly ever saw any beach balls on it for 3 years, but now I am seeing it almost everyday doing routine tasks.

Any thoughts on how I can breath some life into this machine? It still does everything I want it to (basically web browsing and MS Office applications), but it sure could use a speed boost. I have about 20GB of free space on the SSD. Would a clean install of Yosemite help?

 

[Dweez]

My suggestion would be to revert to your previous version of the O/S.

 

[motrek]

I have a 13" 2010 MBA (1.86/4GB/128GB). The machine is starting to show its age. Everything has slowed down a bit. Start up, shut down, opening apps etc. all take a few extra seconds. I hardly ever saw any beach balls on it for 3 years, but now I am seeing it almost everyday doing routine tasks.

Any thoughts on how I can breath some life into this machine? It still does everything I want it to (basically web browsing and MS Office applications), but it sure could use a speed boost. I have about 20GB of free space on the SSD. Would a clean install of Yosemite help?

I noticed some beachballs with the version of Safari in Yosemite. Are you using that? You could try Chrome.

 

[jdphoto]

I have a 13" 2010 MBA (1.86/4GB/128GB). The machine is starting to show its age. Everything has slowed down a bit. Start up, shut down, opening apps etc. all take a few extra seconds. I hardly ever saw any beach balls on it for 3 years, but now I am seeing it almost everyday doing routine tasks.

Any thoughts on how I can breath some life into this machine? It still does everything I want it to (basically web browsing and MS Office applications), but it sure could use a speed boost. I have about 20GB of free space on the SSD. Would a clean install of Yosemite help?

Not sure how you did your upgrade to Yosemite. You could back your files, wipe the machine and install everything from scratch. I try to do that every two years on my machines it seems to help them keep chugging along at a normal pace.

 

[GGJstudios]

I have a 13" 2010 MBA (1.86/4GB/128GB). The machine is starting to show its age. Everything has slowed down a bit. Start up, shut down, opening apps etc. all take a few extra seconds. I hardly ever saw any beach balls on it for 3 years, but now I am seeing it almost everyday doing routine tasks.

Any thoughts on how I can breath some life into this machine?

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​