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What do you use to "clean" your Mac? Opinions?

D

DrJames

macrumors member
Original poster
Do you guys use any repair things or cleaning softwares?

I'm just wondering. My mac is working just fine and I don't use anything and I was wondering if I should.

What do you think?
 
DrJames said:
Do you guys use any repair things or cleaning softwares?

I'm just wondering. My mac is working just fine and I don't use anything and I was wondering if I should.
Click to expand...
You don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Some remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space, with the risk of deleting something important in the process.

These apps will not make your Mac run faster or more efficiently, since having stuff stored on a drive does not impact performance, unless you're running out of drive space. Some of these apps delete caches, which can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt.

Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software. Among other things, it has its own maintenance scripts that run silently in the background on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, without user intervention.

 
Computers do not get "dirty", so you do not have to worry about "cleaning" them.

On the other hand, they may get actuallydirty, in which case you can clean them with clens/iKlear/KlearScreen/ScreenClean, a microfiber cloth, and a vacuum cleaner.
 
interrobang said:
On the other hand, they may get actuallydirty, in which case you can clean them with clens/iKlear/KlearScreen/ScreenClean, a microfiber cloth, and a vacuum cleaner.
Click to expand...

Be careful if you use a vacuum cleaner. A static charge is quite possible and could render your system unusable.
 
Plymouthbreezer said:
Onyx is a decent app, and for me, hasn't royally screwed up Mac OS X.
Click to expand...

Onyx is probably the best out there, but even with Onyx, it's best to make sure you know exactly what it's doing before you tell it to do something. It's possible to screw things up with Onyx, like most any maintenance tool, even though it does a better job of helping to avoid those problems than most.

jW
 
Mal said:
Onyx is probably the best out there, but even with Onyx, it's best to make sure you know exactly what it's doing before you tell it to do something. It's possible to screw things up with Onyx, like most any maintenance tool, even though it does a better job of helping to avoid those problems than most.

jW
Click to expand...
Very true, very true.

I advise my clients to never mess around with any system maintenance tool unless they explicitly understand what that tool will actually do. It's a common misconception that this sort of application/utility knows 100% of the time what and what not to delete/move. Nothing is immune, especially when the app is expected to dig deep into the OS filesystem.
 
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