Cleaning up the boot drive.

[knome]

Ok well i got my mac pro, then used migration manager to move my system over. Now i want to clean up my drive of all the extra crap it accumulated in the system by 4 years of applications that come and go and other stuff. I want to do this because when i moved my system over it is noticeably slower than if i had reinstalled all the apps and moved over documents only.

Here are the things i have already tried:
Mac Janitor (scheduled tasks)
Onyx (optimized system)
Manual removal (to much to go through)

Can anyone think of application that will look in my applications folder or my system locate the recourses that don't point to anything anymore and delete them?

 

[mad jew]

Are you wanting to remove apps or files associated with previously-removed apps?

 

[knome]

files associated with removed apps.

 

[mad jew]

I don't know of any apps that'll do this for you (AppZapper would if the apps weren't already trashed) but I can tell you the folders you want to clean out are the Preferences folder and the Application Support folder. Having said that, this shouldn't be necessary since OSX doesn't worry about these files unless they're being used (and they're obviously not being used). Apart from the actual space they take up on the hard drive (which is likely to be minimal), they won't really have any effect on anything.

 

[knome]

i've already gone through all those places. There are other places apps can leave their tracks like in the system start up and other folders all over the system. Take norton for example. I have removed everything with norton, sysmantec, systemworks i can find but when update my os it comes up with a screen saying norton needs to be updated (WTF)

 

[mad jew]

Maybe have a look through this hint as to how Norton is best removed. Unfortunately, like the PC version, Symantec don't make it easy for us. I ended up reinstalling the OS to get rid of it although that's probably unnecessary.

 

[knome]

yea thats just one of the programs that still pops up with stuff, and other stuff placed on the system like that. thanks.

 

[mad jew]

No worries. I dunno of a general way to get rid of all of these for you so maybe if you post a list of the problem apps, we can try and find methods of removal for at least some of them.