What are the Best Ways to Speed Up a Mac? I have a 2012 Macbook Pro and although it seems to be working fine, over time it has seemed to become more sluggish and less snappy / responsive. So is there any good ways ways that I can 'speed up' my Mac? - this includes stuff like: maximising youtube videos 'lag', the RAM being used up very quickly, Photoshop operations taking a long time to load and Preview struggling to open very large (10000s x 10000s px in size) photos.

My Specs - Macbook Pro 13" (Retina, Late 2012):


CPU: 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
RAM: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 1024 MB
OS: OS X Yosemite 10.10.4
SSD HD: 245/249.77 GB Used
Typical RAM Available with Safari + Chrome Open (with lots of
tabs): 2.5 GB
The only thing I can see which might help is freeing some space on your hard drive. 

With the lack of free space OS X won’t be able to make use of Virtual Memory as efficiently as it should, or possibly at all. I’m not 100% sure about Yosemite, but I’ve experienced a big performance hit on previous OS X releases when the OS can’t allocate as much RAM as it wants to. 

With tools like Photoshop, are you using a separate scratch disk? If not then you’ll be relying on the little internal storage available which will result in OS X having to free up RAM (rather than swapping it) to apply effects/filters/etc.