A few years back you dropped significant cash to switch over from the virus-laden world of Windows to a shiny new Mac, but over time it's gotten slow and crufty. Let's clean it up.
Recommendations on choosing a free mac cleaner. Main features of a good cleaning software. Delete dozens of unnecessary files and make your mac work smoothly. The first thing you need to do when identifying the best mac cleaning software is to make a list of possibilities that a program has. The software’s Cleanup chiefly focus on Cache, Logs, Recent Files, Blacklists, Trash, Web and Others. Along with this, it also tells the estimated total usage of disk for better cleaning. Also Read: 11 Best Mac Anti-Malware Software 2018. Mac Cleaner Software CleanMyMac X: a cleaner your Mac would get. Keep your Mac clean and fast with CleanMyMac X. It removes junk from your Mac, monitors hardware health, and speeds up your system with maintenance scripts.
Before you get started uninstalling this and deleting that, do yourself a favor: hook up an external drive to your Mac and back everything up with Time Machine or any other free alternative. The last thing you want is for your 'clean up' to turn into 'holy crap where did all my Documents go.'
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Geek to Live: Complete, free Mac backup
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Ready? Let's get started. (PC user? You want this article.)
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Find the CPU and Memory Hogs in the Activity Monitor
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First things first. If your Mac is acting like a petulant three-year-old, dragging its feet, crossing its arms, and refusing to do what you ask in any reasonable amount of time, it's time to fire up the Activity Monitor (in Applications > Utilities). Here you'll see a list of running applications and processes. Sort the columns shown in the screenshot to find out what apps are hogging the most CPU time (Firefox, in this case), what apps are for Intel or PowerPC (it's a good idea to use Intel-only apps on Intel Macs), and what apps are running at all. If there are processes running for software you don't need, note them down. Also, if an app is a runaway CPU and memory hog, quit it and restart for immediate relief.
Clean Up Your Startup
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Whether or not the Activity Monitor is showing processes you don't recognize, it's a good idea to audit what programs start up automatically when you log onto your Mac. In System Preferences, Accounts (I know, unintuitive placement), click on the Login Items tab. From there, make sure each and every app listed is something you need and use. If it isn't? Just select it and click the minus (-) sign. (Rule of thumb: Generally you want to keep things called 'SomethingHelper' where Something is an app you use, like iTunes or Growl, as shown.)
Uninstall Unneeded Apps (and Related Files)
Just like your Login Items, you want to cruise through your Applications folder and trash anything you don't need or use any more. To be clear, this won't speed up your Mac, but it will reclaim hard drive space.
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Before you get to dragging and dropping unneeded applications to the trash, though, it's a good idea to install a, well, uninstaller program. Strangely Apple still hasn't shipped a proper uninstaller with Mac OS X, but a few free and pay-for apps will clear out related files when you send an application to the Trash. While the irony of having to install something in order to uninstall something isn't lost on us, keep in mind: your Mac will be fine if an extra plist file gets left behind by an app you once used.
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But, in case you're a neat freak, you want to check out the likes of AppTrap (free, our review), AppDelete (used to be free, now requires a minimum payment of $5 after a few uses, our review), or AppZapper ($13, our review).
Uninstall programs with AppTrap
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File Cleaner Program For Mac 2018
Personally I prefer Hazel, which will set you back $22 for a license—however, in addition to clearing away application files on uninstall, Hazel can make your Mac self-cleaning, too, which makes it worth the cost.
Set Up a Self-Cleaning Mac with Hazel
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Do Some Maintenance
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Now it's time to make sure your disks are in tip-top shape, and luckily, you can do this without any extra software. Simply run Disk Utility (in Applications > Utilities) to verify and repair disk permissions (which determine what apps can do what with what files on your Mac) and verify and repair the disk itself. These operations take some time, and you can't do them while other applications are running, so set 'em in motion before you head out to lunch or to grab coffee.
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To run some more hardcore and detailed maintenance tasks, download the free OnyX (our review). While OnyX does lots of fun Mac customization (see the Parameters tab for that stuff), you want the Maintenance and Cleaning tabs. There you can do things like manually run your Mac's daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts (which don't on their own if you shut down your Mac at night), and clear out log files and system caches. You can also fix system application-specific issues, by rebuilding Spotlight's or Mail's index, if those apps are acting particularly wonky.
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Reclaim Hard Drive Space
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While you're on a cleaning spree, figure out exactly what's taking up all that space on your Mac with a visual tool that maps what's what. Disk Inventory X (free, our review), is your best bet in this area: it creates what's called a 'tree map' of your hard drive usage that will unearth things like 10 gigabytes of video files you just don't need any more.
Download of the Day: Disk Inventory X (Mac)
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To get down to the unneeded-megabyte level, Macworld has some detailed advice for where to find redundant system files and Dashboard widgets. You can also reclaim space taken up by unneeded language files using the free Monolingual (our review).
Prepare Your Mac for Leopard
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Care for and Troubleshoot Your Battery and Memory
If you've got a Mac notebook and you're having trouble with your battery, a few troubleshooting techniques might help. First, to get the longest life out of your battery, calibrate it to make sure your life-o-meter is giving you the right readings.
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If your Mac's battery is cutting out before issuing the 'You're running out of power' warning, you want to reset the SMC or PMU, which cleared up that very problem on my MacBook.
Finally, some problems can be resolved by resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM—but this is generally a last-resort just-short-of-the-Genius-Bar troubleshooting technique for that inexplicable problem your Mac's having.
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Beef Up Your Memory and Get the Latest System Updates
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This should go without saying, but the more memory your Mac has, the snappier it will be. If you're thinking about an upgrade and you've got a MacBook, check out Adam's guide to adding RAM to your Mac.
Hack Attack: How to install RAM in your Mac (and save big $$$)
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Mac Cleaner Software
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Also, it's generally a good idea to stay up-to-date with OS X patches and versions—and normally Software Update runs on its own and does just that. (Note: Yesterday the 10.5.7 update came out, and while I had no problems with it, Gizmodo reports that some people are having issues. As always, back up your stuff continuously to avoid disaster.)
Mac OS X 10.5.7 Released
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Got any tales of victory or defeat when it comes to cleaning up and speeding up your Mac? Tell 'em in the comments.
Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, has a MacBook Pro that's a bit snappier today than it was yesterday. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
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Duplicate files are a waste of disk space, consuming that precious SSD space on a modern Mac and cluttering your Time Machine backups. Remove them to free up space on your Mac.
There are many polished Mac apps for this — but they’re mostly paid software. Those shiny apps in the Mac app store will probably work well, but we have some good options if you don’t want to whip out your credit card.
Gemini and Other Paid Apps
If you do want to spend money on a duplicate-file-finder app, Gemini looks like one of the best options with the slickest interfaces. The trial version worked well for us, and the interface certainly stands out from barebones, free applications like dupeGuru. Gemini can also scan your iTunes and iPhoto library for duplicates. If you’re willing to pay $10 for a better interface, Gemini seems like a good bet.
There are other, similarly polished duplicate-file-finders in the Mac App Store, too — but Apple flags this one as an Editors’ Choice, and we can see why.
As a bonus, the demo version of Gemini allows you to search for and find duplicates, but not remove them. So, if you really wanted, you could use the demo to find duplicates on your Mac, locate them in Finder, and then remove them by hand. Other paid duplicate-file-finder apps have demos that function in a similar way, so this may be convenient if you just want to run an occasional scan and you don’t mind deleting a handful of duplicates by hand.
File Cleaner Program For Macbook Air
There are many good-quality, paid duplicate-file-finding apps for Mac. You can find them with a quick trip to the Mac App Store.
dupeGuru, dupeGuru Music Edition, and dupeGuru Pictures Edition
RELATED:10 Ways To Free Up Disk Space on Your Mac Hard Drive
We also recommended dupeGuru for finding duplicate files on Windows. This application is both open-source and cross-platform. It’s simple to use — open the application, add one or more folders to scan, and click Scan. You’ll see a list of duplicate files, and you can select them and easily move them to the Trash or another folder. You can also preview them, verifying that they actually are duplicates before tossing them away.
dupeGuru is available in three different flavors — a standard edition, an edition designed for finding duplicate music files, and an edition designed for finding duplicate pictures. These tools won’t just find exact duplicates, but should find the same songs encoded at different bitrates and the same picture resized, rotated, or edited.
This application is utilitarian, but it does its job well. You don’t get the shiny interface that you do with the paid Mac apps, but it’s a good free tool for finding and clearing duplicate files. If you want a free application for finding and removing duplicate files on a Mac, this is the one to use.
File Cleaner Program For Macbook
iTunes
Best Program To Clean Mac
iTunes has a built-in feature that can find duplicate music and video files in your iTunes library. It won’t help with other types of files or media files not in iTunes, but it can be a quick way to free up some space if you have a big media library with duplicate files.
To use this feature, open iTunes, click the View menu, and select Show Duplicate Items. You can also hold the Option key on your keyboard and then click the Show Exact Duplicate Items link. This will only show duplicates with the same exact name, artist, and album.
After you click this, iTunes will show you a sorted list of duplicates next to each other. You can go through the list and delete any duplicates from your computer if they actually are duplicates you want to delete. When you’re done, click View > Show All Items to get back to the default list of media.
That’s it? Yup, that’s it. We didn’t want to recommend potentially confusing Terminal commands that output a list of duplicates to a text file, awkward methods that involve scrolling through a list of all the files on your Mac in the Finder, or applications that require disabling the Mac’s Gatekeeper feature to run untrusted binaries. The tools above will do the job, whether you want a barebones-and-free utility or a polished-but-paid application.
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