Does Mountain Lion require Maintenance Apps

[andy8]

Hi,

I clean installed M.Lion and as expected, after some time, my machine has begun getting sluggish and no more as snappy as it used to be.

My question is : Do I need to use Maintenance Applications such as OnyX and use it regularly or would I need to simply allow Macbook Pro to run its (fragmentation and cache cleaning, permissions repair) proprietary maintenance as it is meant for.

I don't intend to upgrade any hardware at all : I have 4Gb RAM but no Solid State drive. I want to get the best out of my current configuration (2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo - Macbook Pro 13").

Thank you.

 

[GGJstudios]

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 can even degrade, rather than improve system performance.

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. Caches exist to improve performance, so deleting them isn't advisable in most cases.

Many of the tasks performed by these apps 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.

With very few exceptions, you don't need to defrag on Mac OS X, except possibly when partitioning a drive.

About disk optimization with Mac OS X

You probably won't need to optimize at all if you use Mac OS X.

Five Mac maintenance myths​

If you're having performance issues, this may help:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X​

 

[andy8]

Thank you. It was very helpful. I appreciate it very much. The second link you posted on Performance Tips was quite good.

 

[cmeisenzahl]

Good thread, thanks, guys.