Cleaning up my Mac?

[Suno]

Spring is right around the corner, and I've had my Macbook Pro for about 6 months now. It's starting to feel dusty and cluttered. What is the best method of I guess organizing and cleaning up a Mac?

Like on Windows, I'd clean up the registry, defragment the HDD, delete files/folders of programs that I uninstalled but still stayed, erase free memory, etc. What would be the equivalent to a royal washing on a Mac?

Unrelated question: I have this file called sleepimage in /private/var/vm that's taking up 8GB. I'm sure it's an important file, but is there any way to decrease the file size?

 

[phinsup]

Sleepimage will always be the size of whatever gb of ram you have installed. It's a dump of what's in the memory.

 

[flat five]

What would be the equivalent to a royal washing on a Mac?

clean install the OS?

in the earlier osx days, i used to do a lot of 'maintenance' on my computers.. onyx stuff, some direct terminal commands, etc.. but for the past few years, i've been leaving it alone and honestly, i think things are better that way.. just let os x do it's thing(s) and don't fiddle with it unless you have a very specific need for doing so.. but tinkering for the sake of tinkering is not going to do anything to smooth out the computer.. you're more likely to slow things down (at least temporarily) with no long term benefits..


try to keep stuff (files) organized on a daily basis.. but once you get to the point of no return (for me, approx every 18months), backup the good stuff then start from scratch..

 

[chrisrosemusic1]

Disk Utility > Verify and repair disk > Verify and repair disk permissions.

Safari > Reset Safari

Recent Items > Clear

That's all I do from time to time. Obviously delete any un used applications and remove their preferences/support files from Library after wards.

 

[dusk007]

In the ../vm folder are swap files and sleepimage.
You can only shrink the swap files by restarting or buy more RAM if you rack up a big one all the time.

You can get rid of the sleepimage by disabling safe sleep. Something I would do anyway because it speeds up standby entry. Much more convenient and a totally useless feature unless you frequently run out of battery because you leave the notebook lying around unplugged for days.

open terminal.

sudo pmset -a hibernationmode 0

That removes the sleepimage which is as big as your RAM. ie 8GB if you have this much RAM.