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tosslobbs

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 16, 2013
2
0
Hi guys,
I used to reformat my PC’s hard drive monthly to clean out all the files that slowed it down. Then it would run like it was brand new. How often do I need to do that with the Mac? :D
 

benwiggy

macrumors 68020
Jun 15, 2012
2,371
179
to clean out all the files that slowed it down.
There are no such files in OS X.

Normally, your Mac should run fine and not need any regular preventative maintenance. There is no reason that OS X will degrade its performance over time, or as the result of accumulated files.

I would concur that reinstalling is rarely necessary, unless you have deleted or modified some essential system files. Otherwise, nearly every problem is solvable without reinstalling the OS.

Also, I would stay away from any "cleaning" apps that are often advertised, as they are at best unnecessary and at worst, harmful.

If you do get problems with your Mac, there are a number of things you can do to restore performance, most notably emptying the caches. A corrupt cache might cause slowness.
Note that caches should not be regularly emptied, as the whole point of a cache is to speed things up.

I used to reformat my PC’s hard drive monthly
Wow. Welcome to OS X. I'm surprised your hard drives didn't fail after a couple of years of doing that.
 

Drew017

macrumors 65816
May 29, 2011
1,254
11
East coast, USA
The only thing I'd recommend doing is cleaning the caches out every month or so. You can download Onyx which is a maintenance app for Mac. Anything else is kinda unnecessary IMO ;)
 

bobr1952

macrumors 68020
Jan 21, 2008
2,040
39
Melbourne, FL
The only thing I'd recommend doing is cleaning the caches out every month or so. You can download Onyx which is a maintenance app for Mac. Anything else is kinda unnecessary IMO ;)

I started using this last month and really like it. I never really felt the need to clean out cache on my iMac--and although I have plenty of storage on my rMBP--256GB of storage is certainly not unlimited and so cleaning up on a regular basis is not such a bad thing. Onyx is quite a nice little product. :)
 

benwiggy

macrumors 68020
Jun 15, 2012
2,371
179
The only thing I'd recommend doing is cleaning the caches out every month or so.
cleaning up on a regular basis is not such a bad thing.
There is NO need or advantage from emptying caches on a regular basis. As said earlier, the whole point of caches is to speed things up. Emptying them will slow down your machine and impair performance.

Onyx is an excellent utility, but I would wait until you get a problem before running its various tasks.
 

w0lf

macrumors 65816
Feb 16, 2013
1,268
109
USA
There is NO need or advantage from emptying caches on a regular basis. As said earlier, the whole point of caches is to speed things up. Emptying them will slow down your machine and impair performance.

I'll second this, cleaning your cache is just going to slow things down, not speed things up.

Honestly there is really no need to perform maintenance before the fact, most of the time you'll just end up doing more harm than good.
 
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