Mac Upkeep

[rogefoo]

What do you guys use for general upkeep on your macs? I've never really bothered with it, but I'm starting to see a dip in performance after a couple of years (duh) of not doing anything. Any good program recommendations? I hear MacKeeper is good, but it's not free. Any thoughts?

 

[tug]

onyx is a good piece of software to maintain and optimize macs, you can get it here.


http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

 

[GGJstudios]

You really don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space. It 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.

One app that I would not recommend, based on the number of complaints that have been posted in this forum and elsewhere, is CleanMyMac. As an example: CleanMyMac cleaned too much.

Mac OS X does a good job of taking care of itself, without the need for 3rd party software.

• Check your Login Items under System Preferences > Accounts to see what you have automatically launching.
• Also check /Library/LaunchAgents/ and /Users/yourusername/Library/LaunchAgents/ for items launching at startup
• Look at what widgets you may have running.
• Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes". Then look to see what may be consuming system resources.
• Take a look at the System Memory tab at the bottom of Activity Monitor to see if you have excessive page outs, a sign that you may benefit from more RAM.

 

[Awesomeness]

Don't get anything. Macs do their own automated upkeep. And most importantly, do not get any antivirus/"optimization" software! MacKeeper and CleanMyMac are utter shady BS and they do nothing except mess your OS copy up. Testimonials show software like MacKeeper is almost impossible to uninstall and about 1/2 of the time it seems to eventually break your OS.

 

[aross99]

What do you guys use for general upkeep on your macs? I've never really bothered with it, but I'm starting to see a dip in performance after a couple of years (duh) of not doing anything. Any good program recommendations? I hear MacKeeper is good, but it's not free. Any thoughts?

Have you been upgrading OS X every year? My experience is that each release of OS X can take a bit more horsepower and use more resources. Sometimes adding memory can help.

Over time these little increases can produce a noticeable decrease in performance. I would agree that there isn't any real "cleanup" procedure you can do to improve your performance...

 

[Isair]

You really don't need "cleaner" or "maintenance" apps to keep your Mac running well, and some of these apps can do more harm than good. Most only remove files/folders or unused languages or architectures, which does nothing more than free up some drive space.

True.

Don't get anything. Macs do their own automated upkeep.

Partially true.

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System Performance
The computer is running unusually slowly although it is not experiencing abnormally high CPU utilization.

If you are experiencing something similar to this, you may want to reset your Mac's SMC (System Managemenet Controller). http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964

Other than that Onyx is a good maintenance application. However most of the options you have in Onyx is there for saving some disk space and fixing issues you may have.