Q: is it safe to download the mackeeper?

I don't think it's a question of "morality." I simply like to leave my hard drive as free of non-Apple stuff as possible, and I take it that you are of a similar mind. In that respect, learning to use the Finder instead of non-Apple solutions suits my style very well.

absolutely correct.

Technically incorrect. A moral perspective is one in which you imply that some behaviour is worthy and to be praised and some other behaviour is unworthy and to be scorned.

Exactly what you did when you stated what is 'best' for other mac users and (didn't...) criticize my recommendatioin of alternative software:

LexSchellings pontificated:

 

Personally I think that getting routine to using Finder is the best way for a mac user.

This time your reply was unexpected . But I did not criticize your Sweeper, just said that you can do it with Finder. Don't come between me and Ronda ! Ha, Ha. See you around, I appreciate your help to others.

One of your nicer posts. Your appreciation is appreciated.

OMG, I ONLY have nice posts!

*waves* Hey guys! I just uninstalled MacKeeper. I was on a PC up until last year, so I am still learning the ropes.

What I liked about it is that it told me where duplicate files were and it backed up my harddrive and external drive online.

Do you guys have any suggestions for programs I could use that would do this? I did just download DupeGuru, which brought up all sorts of dupes for me, but they are .jar files, which I have no idea what to do with.

I also downloaded Omni, which has showed me my largest folders, but I am not sure what I can clean or keep. I was much, much more PC literate and hate not knowing my way around the MAC. Any tips would be so very much appreiciated!

The best thing you can do with a Mac is to buy an external FireWire drive and use SuperDuper! (my preference) to keep a bootable clone (or clones) of your hard drive on the external.

My MacBook Pro has a 500 GB hard drive. I keep two external hard drives: a 1 TB external FireWire drive partitioned into two partitions (500 GB each) and a 2 TB external FireWire drive partitioned into four partitions (500 GB each), so the two drives together offer me the possibility of having six bootable backups of my hard drive. When I make a new clone, I overwrite the oldest one, naming each volume with the date I cloned my hard drive.

People talk about hard drive maintenance, but you really don't need to worry about that as long as you keep a substantial amount of available (free) space on your internal hard drive so it has plenty of room for temporary files.

Mac OS X pretty much takes care of itself.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319#

This link bears repeating:

http://www.reedcorner.net/news.php/?p=245

There is one thing that is the same for PC and Mac: backups...backups...backups.... And, as Ronda said: a clone is even better because you can boot from it.

For Mac you should "forget" a lot that was necessary in Windows:

NO defragmentation needed, NO cleaning of caches needed (OSX takes care of that automatically), NO antivirus apps please and NO antimalware please (they serve at nothing and even can do harm, built in in Mac OS, download all updates), NO tuners/optimizers and such needed.

Imagine all the time you have now free to do what you want, time that you used to worry about the security and efficiency of your Windows PC !

As for your question of "doubles": some apps have built in a possibility to show "doubles", in general you can use Finder sorted by name or time in the list view, and you read the doubles easily by checking the size date etc. Doubles also have the -1 or even 02 added to the name.

Searching: If you do not want resources "spilled" by the indexing of the "Spotlight" app, turn off Spotlight and use a (free) app like "FindAnyFile or "Easyfind" to search for files.

Ooh! Thank you for all of the wonderful tips! I do have a fairly new Western Digital harddrive. I have yet to be able to back my MAC up to it, since I guess it is read only for my MAC. I am not sure how to to change that, I bought it originally for my PC. I have a bunch of stuff on it, so I can't re-write it without backing everything up. Do you have any suggestions on how to do that or how I should proceed?

Over the past few weeks I am getting the start up disk full message, so I know I need to get some stuff off my HD and onto my external drive, but I also have a sneaking suspicion there is something else going on, because I really don't think I have used that much space.

It is so nice, though, to not have to worry about keeping it clean like a PC! Although it is hard to let go over my old cleaning tendencies! LOL

Thanks, Lex!

So I'm new to the whole Mac Universe and bad habbits die hard, so here we go. I just had this Mackeeper pop up and so forth and I down loaded it. After doing so  I scaned my mac it said I had all these threats and I thought it was fishy so I googled it and found these post. Thought all was well being that I've been told it's hard to get a virus on these macs but still I down loaded it anyways. I just draged them to the trash to uninstall them being that it was what I was suposed to do, but what now? how much truble am I in? I'm really freaked out cause I got this computer to start my dream of opening a clothing line and hate to see I just flushed all my money down the tube!

Please HELP!

You didn't flush all your money — only what you threw away on MacKeeper. Use the instructions I've linked below to delete it completely from your computer. Note that if you've already deleted a few of the pieces, you won't find them in the course of following these instructions, but proceed through all the steps anyway:

http://applehelpwriter.com/2011/09/21/how-to-uninstall-mackeeper-malware/

Thanks much, I just read that the only way to get a virus is when you down load stuff and put in your password, is that the case? second to that how do you beleive that I got the pop-up to began with?

Again thanks so much.