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Huntn

macrumors Penryn
Original poster
May 5, 2008
24,097
27,192
The Misty Mountains
Recently discovered Uniblue Machanic a Cleanup utility that is quite impressive. It can be downloaded for free, but there are limits on the quantity of data it will clean. For example it may identify a Gb of junk, but will only offer to remove 500Mb. Can it be run multiple times? Maybe. I decided to purchase it for $40. It helped me easily remove 3Gb of junk, duplicate files, and unused programsoff my MBP.. :)
 
Update Feb2015: Machanic does not appear to be Yosemite compatible although the web site advertises it as MacOS 10.7+. Note, it worked well under Mavericks. Requesting a refund through the website. :-\
 
Update Feb2015: Machanic does not appear to be Yosemite compatible although the web site advertises it as MacOS 10.7+. Note, it worked well under Mavericks. Requesting a refund through the website. :-\

Do you really need this app? Risky to say the least in letting this app remove files from your file system and risking damage.
 
Do you really need this app? Risky to say the least in letting this app remove files from your file system and risking damage.

Depends on how trust worthy you are of any "clean up" utility. I use one in Windows all the time. No issues... so far. Those things being removed are of categories, like temp files, browser downloads, things of those nature. You can look at the list before you remove them if you want. Normally I do.
 
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. Most only 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. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt. Browser caches can be emptied from within the browser, with no need for another app.
Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance. 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.
 
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. Most only 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. In fact, deleting some caches can hurt performance, rather than help it, since more system resources are used and performance suffers while each cache is being rebuilt. Browser caches can be emptied from within the browser, with no need for another app.
Many of these tasks should only be done selectively to troubleshoot specific problems, not en masse as routine maintenance. 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.

Not questioning your knowledge on this, nor am I disagreeing with you. I'll just point that I got it strictly for freeing up hard drive space and the first time I used it, it freed up 3 GB of space. No bad occurrences noted. Yosemite broke it so I am seeking a refund as it falls within the 60 return policy. Should I be worried the company is located in Malta? But they are a Microsoft Partner! We'll see. :)
 
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I agree with the post above yours. Any maintenance stuff on Mac is absolutely useless. It's not gonna do anything. It can instead just cause more damage to your computer.
 
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