How to Speed Up Your Mac Before a Big Presentation

You’re about to walk into a board meeting, demo to a client, or open keynote talk to 200 people. The presentation runs locally on your Mac. You’ve rehearsed twice. The only thing standing between you and a great talk is the laptop deciding to start a Time Machine backup at the worst possible moment.

This is a 10-minute pre-presentation prep that handles every common Mac failure mode. Run it before you walk in.

Hour before: charge and clean

Plug your Mac in. Confirm the battery icon shows charging. Even Apple Silicon Macs throttle on low battery, and you don’t want to find out at slide 14.

While it charges:

1. Quit every app you won’t use during the talk
2. Empty the Downloads folder of large files (if your SSD is tight)
3. Run Sweep one-click cleanup — frees inactive memory, pauses background processes
4. Reboot if it’s been more than a few days

A reboot resolves a remarkable number of “weird” issues. Mac uptime over a week is a small risk; over a month is rolling the dice.

Free up RAM in one clickSweep frees inactive memory and pauses runaway processes. Get Sweep free →

Disable Notifications, period

There is nothing worse than a Slack message popping up on a projected screen mid-presentation. Use Focus mode:

1. Click the time in the menu bar
2. Focus > Do Not Disturb (or set up a custom Presentation focus)
3. Confirm the menu bar shows the moon icon

Belt-and-suspenders approach: turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth during the talk if you don’t need them for the presentation. Notifications can’t reach you if the network can’t.

For Slack specifically, set yourself to Do Not Disturb in the app as well — the macOS focus doesn’t always block Slack’s own banners.

Stop Time Machine and cloud sync

Backups in the middle of a presentation will tank performance and may even pop a system dialog. Disable temporarily:

• System Settings > General > Time Machine, toggle Back Up Automatically off
• Pause Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud Drive (each has a pause option in their menu bar app)
• Turn off auto-sync in Notion, Notability, GoodNotes if you use them

Re-enable everything afterward. Sweep handles all of these automatically with its speed boost mode.

Pause Spotlight indexing

If you’ve recently moved files or installed an app, Spotlight may be reindexing in the background and chewing CPU. A spike during the presentation will lag your slide animations.

Pause it:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

Re-enable with on instead of off after the talk.

Test the projector or display before you start

Most demo failures aren’t software — they’re connection issues:

• HDMI vs USB-C adapters: bring both, plus the right dongle for your specific Mac
• 4K display compatibility: some older projectors choke on 4K signal
• Mirror vs extend: practice both — for Keynote, you usually want extend so your notes show on the laptop while slides go to the projector

In Keynote, Play > Customize Presenter Display lets you set what you see on your laptop. Practice with this before the day-of.

In PowerPoint, Slide Show > Set Up Slide Show > Use Presenter View does the same.

Free RAM right before opening the deck

Memory pressure is the silent killer of presentation smoothness. Slide animations and embedded videos both want RAM. Run through this in the last 5 minutes:

1. Activity Monitor: Memory tab open in a window
2. Quit any apps you don’t need (browsers especially)
3. Run Sweep speed boost
4. Confirm Memory Pressure is solid green
5. Then open Keynote / PowerPoint

If you load the deck while memory pressure is yellow, the first transition will hitch.

Have backups ready

Belt-and-suspenders for the deck itself:

• The Keynote/PowerPoint file on your Mac (primary)
• A PDF export on the same Mac (fallback if the app crashes)
• The deck on USB drive
• The deck in cloud storage (Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud)

If your Mac genuinely fails, you need to be able to walk to a colleague’s laptop and present from PDF in under 30 seconds.

Turn off automatic updates for the day

The last thing you need is macOS deciding to install a 3 GB update right when you open Keynote.

System Settings > General > Software Update > i (info icon) and toggle off:

• Install macOS updates
• Install application updates from the App Store

Re-enable afterward.

Skip the manual huntSweep finds the cache and cruft slowing down your workflow. Try Sweep free →

Clear Keynote and PowerPoint caches

If your deck has been edited many times or includes lots of media, the cache can become bloated and laggy:

• Keynote autosaves: ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iWork.Keynote/Data/Library/Autosave Information/
• PowerPoint cache: ~/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Powerpoint/Data/Library/Caches/
• Office Document Cache (sometimes blocks edits): in Microsoft AutoUpdate or via the Office support pages

Sweep flags these along with the rest of macOS cache during a smart scan.

A 10-minute pre-talk routine

Print this list, walk through it before every talk:

1. Reboot Mac (if uptime > 1 week)
2. Plug in, charge to at least 50%
3. Quit browsers, Slack, Discord, Mail, Photos
4. Sweep one-click cleanup
5. Enable Do Not Disturb
6. Pause Time Machine, Dropbox, Spotlight
7. Disable auto-update temporarily
8. Connect projector/display, test mirroring
9. Open Keynote/PowerPoint, run through first 3 slides
10. Verify backup PDF is on USB and in cloud

Then walk in confident the Mac will not embarrass you. The hardware is up to it. The trick is making sure nothing else on the system gets in the way.