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Spring Cleaning... What do I need to do to maximize performance?

E

erose86

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 11, 2009
5
0
Pennsylvania
Hello everyone!

First of all... let me say that I am sort of a "newbie" when it comes to things like this concerning a Mac... and I am in no way proficient in the world of computers... So this might be a *really* stupid question, forgive me.

My mac mini has received lots of love (and lots of use) this year and as of lately it's been running a little slower than usual. I'm guessing it might have to do with how much crap I have shoved onto it... I only have 10.75GB of disk space left.....

So my plan is to now go through and do a massive delete of anything on my computer that is unneeded and a back up of anything I want to keep but probably won't need in the immediate future, to give it a little bit more breathing room.

When I used to use windows (gasp!), when I would do this, I would run the "disk clean-up" utility as well as the disk defragmenter. Does mac have anything similar to those things that I should run to maximize performance on my machine once I'm done "cleaning" it out?

Also, there used to be folders that I would dig into on windows to delete components of programs that I had downloaded and since deleted, that didn't get deleted with the program... or perhaps things that firefox may have downloaded while I was using it... are there any folders like that hiding on my mac that I could go through to get rid of unnecessary garbage?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks, I really appreciate any help you can give me! :)
 
Not really. The disk will defragment itself under OSX although with only 10GB left, things will get a little hairy. Most applications delete everything with the application when you trash it although you can use something like AppTrap or AppZapper to get rid of any left overs. Most of the routine stuff like logs is cleaned out by the nightly maintenance scripts so leave your mini on overnight and that will take care of it. You really should have a minimum of 20% free disk space.
 
The Mac installs of programs is handled differently
Deleting the App is usually sufficient or you can use the uninstallers that come with them
Any residual files are usually just .plists and such and do not consume much space at all and do not use resources
They are not worth your trouble

As far as defragmenting, check out this article from Apple

You can use iDefrag, but it really isn't necessary

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
I would only suggest doing a Permissions Repair through the DiskUtility.app in the Utilities folder on your main HDD (OS X, or Macintosh HD).

This can improve the way certain things work occasionally, and can fix some hiccups that happen over time.

Other than that the other 2 posters are pretty much on the money with their thoughts.
 
bmcgonag said:
I would only suggest doing a Permissions Repair through the DiskUtility.app in the Utilities folder on your main HDD (OS X, or Macintosh HD).

This can improve the way certain things work occasionally, and can fix some hiccups that happen over time.

Other than that the other 2 posters are pretty much on the money with their thoughts.
Click to expand...

I would suggest DoktorKleanor a free and easy to use app for the common problems.
 
MacDawg said:
The Mac installs of programs is handled differently
Deleting the App is usually sufficient or you can use the uninstallers that come with them
Any residual files are usually just .plists and such and do not consume much space at all and do not use resources
They are not worth your trouble
Click to expand...

That isn't quite right. Many Applications use shared support files which are usually placed in /Library/Application Support.

For example, a CS4 Design Premium install has ~1.25GB there.

Clearing caches can also be a space saver. Using an application like Cocktail makes this easy. Instead of doing this every once in awhile, it would be a good idea to create some scripts to handle these things. You can easily create a logout hook that runs every x number of days to handle tasks.

You can also use Cocktail and schedule tasks with it as well.

If you want to know what is taking up space, use something like DaisyDisk.
 
DaisyDisk gives a visual, but it's hard to tell what files to delete that aren't huge, and usually you can't delete those. I find Whatsize to be a better alternative. Also, you can use Monolingual to delete a lot of language files that take up a good amount of space (be careful not to delete English). Onyx, iTool and IceClean, (and to a lesser extent MacClean) can delete a lot more things. Other ways to make space are to delete what's in Downloads or copy them to DVD or CD.
 
-aggie- said:
DaisyDisk gives a visual, but it's hard to tell what files to delete that aren't huge, and usually you can't delete those. I find Whatsize to be a better alternative. Also, you can use Monolingual to delete a lot of language files that take up a good amount of space (be careful not to delete English). Onyx, iTool and IceClean, (and to a lesser extent MacClean) can delete a lot more things. Other ways to make space are to delete what's in Downloads or copy them to DVD or CD.
Click to expand...

As for finding huge files to move or get rid of I use JDiskReport...it's free and gives you a list of the top 100 larges files. Mine always end up being movies and iMovie projects that I forget about, but can easily move to an external drive.
 
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