The modern Apple Mac computer is healthy and efficient, the OS taking care of all the day-to-day maintenance seamlessly and without interrupting the user. But then users do what they do and use the machine, things get added, things get taken away, discs get stuffed with data, and the machine starts to act a little less smooth.
However, because those tools which keep your Mac healthy are so beautifully seamless and hidden, you have no way to know if they are being conducted properly, if at all. The way to get peace of mind is to use a Mac utility to address those maintenance tasks manually.
Also read: How to Clean, Sanitize and Disinfect Your Mac, iPhone and iPad
Simple and Powerful
MacCleaner Pro 2 is the latest revision of Nektony’s answer to the question: how can I maintain my Mac easily and quickly without expert knowledge. The answer is a suite of software tools which neatly and automatically scan your discs and provide you with push-button tools to tune the performance and efficiency of your Mac.
The software contains four core modules and three Pro modules. The built-in modules are the Overview tab, Speed up, Clean up and Manage disk. The additional Pro modules expand the toolset with external apps, find duplicate files, completely uninstall apps and analyze disk usage.
Seek and Destroy
MacCleaner begins scanning as soon as you run it, going through your currently-mounted discs and partitions to detect anomalies. The first time you run the program, this can take a little while, as the software needs to look through and index your entire drive contents. It’s not an excessive amount of time to scan it, but you may want to go grab a coffee while you’re waiting. No rush, you want it to be thorough.
Once the scan is complete, you will see a quick at-a-glance overview of the current state of your machine, with a color-coded bar graph of your disk usage at the top and three big panels at the bottom with details of performance issues, junk files you can remove and user files which may be taking up excessive space.
Clicking the button under the first panel takes you to the speedup tab where you can free up RAM (which in my case was 77% used) or disable those pesky startup apps. It’s quite common to clutter your machine with apps that run a helper app on startup, and yet you never use the app in question. A quick review of the apps you have running will enable you to decide which to kill.
Also on this tab you can reindex Spotlight, which may be out of date, though this usually takes a while, so it should perhaps be done at the end of the day. Macs are happiest when Spotlight’s search assistant database is up to date, as it allows fast access to files once the machine knows where they all are without explicitly searching. You can also reindex your email database, another cause of slowdown issues.
The Clean up section is all about your files, including caches, installation files, language files (other than ones you use or speak) and downloads you still have hanging around. These are all things which add to the load on your disk, and if you don’t use them, then you have to ditch them. The tools in this section make it very easy for you to view and remove this pesky file litter.
The next section is Manage Disk Space, which does a neat trick to help you find files which may be taking up too much room: it groups files by type. Click on a file type in the left column, and in the right column you have a selectable list for you to review and decide if you still need these files. As a part of this, there is a section for duplicate files, and this activates the Duplicate File Finder app. Drop folders on here (or use the buttons to scan your entire Home folder), and duplicates can be found and removed.
Another module which does a very deep dive into what your discs contain is the Analyze Disk Usage app, called Disk Expert. Using this tool you can scan and evaluate exactly how your disk space is being used.
The App Cleaner & Uninstaller is a safe way to completely remove apps and their dependencies, that is to say small files littered around your machine which serve the main app. Well-mannered apps keep all that stuff in the app container, as per Apple guidelines, so you can just junk the app – and it’s removed. But you can’t always rely on developers being kind, and if they are lazy, this removes any of their orphaned file junk from your disk.
Safe and Sound
MacCleaner Pro 2 is priced at $44.95, and there is a trial version available on the web site. I love using this software: it’s clean, easy and quick to identify the key areas where your Mac is suffering from bloat. I can recommend it to all Mac users, especially creatives rather than technicians. The key benefit of this kind of software is that it gives you the information you need to make good decisions about what to remove from your machine.
Of course, deleting files without knowing what they are can cause problems. The software is intelligent, and it knows all the system files that you shouldn’t touch, so it’s safe to use on your machine; however, you should always be smart and do a Google check before you erase any files you’re not sure about. Let’s be careful out there.
This is a sponsored article and was made possible by Nektony. The actual contents and opinions are the sole views of the author who maintains editorial independence, even when a post is sponsored.
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