How to Establish an Apple Identity on a Mac. When you first turn on your Mac (or install an upgrade to the operating system), a series of questions and prompts appear, including a prompt to sign in to your Apple ID account or create a new Apple ID.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to optimize your Mac for Gaming. In the past, Macs have not always been associated with gaming, but times just might be changing. It almost goes without saying that you need to meet the specification requirements of the games that you want to play, but with just a few tweaks, gamers can easily enhance and optimize their Mac for gaming. This guide tells you how.

1. Choose Apple menu  About This Mac, then click Storage. Each segment of the bar is an estimate of the storage space used by a category of files. Move your pointer over each segment for more detail. Click the Manage button to open the Storage Management window, pictured below.
2. Wait, There's More. There is more to the Dock than just hiding and showing. In addition to being able to move the Dock to the left or right side of the screen, you can make subtle changes that affect the Dock both in controlling how fast the Dock appears or disappears, as well as eliminating some of the Dock's animation to speed things up a bit more.

Optimize Your Mac for Gaming

Nowadays, more and more top-quality games are being released for Mac on a daily basis. Apple users can access games through the app store and game developer communities like Steam. Other apps like PokerStars can be directly downloaded to your Mac, giving you access to exciting games, including the upcoming Power Up, which blends poker and eSports. Developers have also started to make their work available on Mac, and now it’s time for gamers to follow.

How to Optimize Your Mac for Gaming

You can start by freeing up disk space on your machine. Your hard drive is not an essential component for gaming, but it is needed in order to install games onto your machine, as well as for running games and apps smoothly. Uninstall unwanted, unused and outdated apps to make room, especially those that run needlessly in the background or that take up a lot of space unnecessarily.

Sift through your files and delete what you don’t need. It might be painful to let go of your old music or photos but just think of the gaming as you delete them, or simply move what you want to keep to the cloud or an external storage device. Do whatever you can to free up disk space by removing everything that you don’t want or need.

Next, it’s time to free up RAM, which truly is important for the performance of your games. RAM is the type of memory that is required for live processes and having enough of it free will make games faster and smoother. Disable apps that start up automatically and keep other apps closed during gaming time. Any apps that are open will consume resources, weakening the performance of your Mac.

One of the biggest consumers of resources is your web browser, so make sure you close your Chrome or Firefox before you game. Having them open in the background will almost definitely slow the game down. You should also close heavy web browser plugins like Java and Flash or just uninstall them completely if you don’t need them. If you really want to nitpick for more RAM, you can even disable OS X features that you don’t need like the Dashboard, but this is going a bit far if you don’t really need the extra memory.

You can also check on your Mac’s overall performance before gaming with the Activity Monitor, which will show you the GPU and disk resources, as well as the apps and processes that are running and the amount of memory they are consuming. This will allow you to see if you have overlooked any background apps that are taking up too much space or memory without purpose and close or uninstall them.

Game performance is related to graphics in a lot of ways. For example, a higher resolution requires more processing power and may result in poor performance if your Mac can’t “hack it”. Changing graphics settings is, therefore, one of the most powerful ways to easily enhance performance. OS X does most of the work when it comes to the system graphic settings, but you can also change the in-game settings to optimize your Mac.

Lower resolution and lower Anti-Aliasing will improve performance as well but to the detriment of graphics quality. Instead of lowering these, you can first start by lowering the shadow quality. Shadows take a lot of processing power because they have to account for a lot of factors like the angle of the light and the shape and posture of the object or character. Turn this down to improve performance with little overall effect on graphics quality. Reducing the texture also has a similar effect.

It is generally not possible to upgrade graphics cards on a Mac, but what you can do is upgrade your hard drive. With an older Mac, you may want to upgrade to an SSD for improved loading times and system task performances. If your Mac doesn’t have the RAM capacity for the games you want to play, you can also upgrade to 8 or 16GB RAM to enhance the performance. By following the tips here, your Mac should be ready to handle any game that its specifications allow. Happy gaming!

Resizing a window can be useful in many situations. For instance, when you need to fit more than one on the same screen. The following sections show you how to resize a window in using both Windows and macOS.

Note

A window that is maximized cannot be resized. Furthermore, certain types of windows cannot be resized at all.

Basic resize in Windows

As you can see in the image below, there are two buttons for resizing a window automatically.

• Minimize - Clicking this button, which looks like a dash, collapses the window onto the Taskbar.
• Maximize / Resize - Clicking this button, which looks like a box or two boxes, toggles the window between full and nearly full (not maximized) screen.

Custom resize in Windows

When the upper-right section of the window looks like , your window is now in 'resize mode,' meaning you can use the mouse cursor to make the window any size you want. To do so, move the cursor to any edge or corner of the window until a double-headed arrow appears. When this arrow appears, click-and-drag it to make the window larger or smaller. If this double-headed arrow does not appear, the window cannot be resized.

The below animation shows a double-headed arrow on the bottom, left, and corner of a window and how it resizes a window. To make the window horizontally bigger, move the cursor to the left or right edge of the window until it turns into the double-headed arrow. To make the window vertically bigger, do the same thing at the top or bottom of the window. To resize both horizontally and vertically, use one of the corners of the window.

How to resize a window using the Windows key and keyboard

If you are running Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 10, you can use Windows key keyboard shortcuts to resize and arrange windows on your computer. For example, pressing the Windows key and the left arrow key to resizes it to fit only the left half of the screen. Windows key and the right arrow key to resize the window to fit the right half of the screen.

How to resize a window using Windows menus

A window can also be resized using a series of keyboard shortcuts. Below are the steps for resizing a window only using the keyboard.

1. Press Alt+Space to open the window menu.
2. If the window is maximized, arrow down to Restore and press Enter, then press Alt+Space bar again to open the window menu.
3. Arrow down to Size.
4. Press the up or downarrow key if you want to resize the window vertically, or the left or right arrow key if you want to resize horizontally.
5. Once an arrow key is pressed, you can press the same arrow key or the opposite arrow key to resize the window.

How to resize a game window

When playing a computer game, it most likely defaults to a fullscreen mode that prevents the game from resizing. To resize a game window, the game must first be capable of being played in a windowed mode. If available, the setting is found in the game settings and may be labeled 'borderless fullscreen' or 'window mode' or be a checkbox. Once in a window mode, it may be possible to resize the window using any of the methods mentioned on this page. However, keep in mind that some games only have a window mode for performance reasons and may still not support the ability to be resized.

How to resize a window on a Mac

A Mac window can be resized using the mouse and the buttons located in the upper-left corner of the desktop.

• Minimize - Clicking this button (yellow circle), which looks like a dash, collapses the window into the Dock.
• Maximize / Resize - Clicking this button (green circle), which looks like a box or two boxes, toggles the window between full and nearly full (not maximized) screen.
• Custom size - First, make sure that the window is not maximized. Then, hover your mouse cursor over the corner, bottom, or top of the window. Click and drag to resize the window to the size you desire.

Additional information

Mac Os Minimize All Windows

• See our minimize, maximize, resize, and window pages for related information.