Iamawesome997

Q: Best clean up utility for Mac OS X?

Hi everyone,

Recently, there have been two OS X clean up utilities for which I've been getting ads for.

They are:

-CleanMyMac 2

-MacKeeper 2012

 

I want to know which is better.

Thanks.

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.3), 13" Entry level model, uses an SSD

Posted on Mar 28, 2013 4:18 PM

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Q: Best clean up utility for Mac OS X?

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  • by thomas_r.,

    thomas_r. thomas_r. Mar 31, 2015 7:31 AM in response to danafromprovincetown
    Level 7 (30,889 points)
    Mac OS X
    Mar 31, 2015 7:31 AM in response to danafromprovincetown

    Yes, well, there's a lot of bad advice out there. Many of the major Mac publications will post recommendations for various "cleaning" utilities, because those companies throw them advertising dollars. In the case of CNET, you really can't trust anything they say*, since their own download.cnet.com site is actively injecting adware into some of the software downloads available there.

     

    (* One exception to the rule: Topher Kessler wrote for MacFixIt, which got bought by CNET. He then continued writing under CNET's management for a while, so many of his articles can be found on CNET. They are good despite the fact that they are on a CNET site now.)

  • by Kurt Lang,

    Kurt Lang Kurt Lang Mar 31, 2015 7:51 AM in response to danafromprovincetown
    Level 8 (37,691 points)
    Mar 31, 2015 7:51 AM in response to danafromprovincetown

    To add to Thomas' notes. I have subscribed to Macworld and Mac|Life (formerly Mac Addict) magazines for years. Only twice that I can recall did they ever cover a utility like these in a review. It was MacKeeper in its very early days, and the gave it a so-so review. The other was for CleanMyiPad, which was roundly criticized by one mag or the other for its complete uselessness. Since then, I haven't seen either mention any cleaning or other such app in years. It could be taken that by omission they don't endorse any of them.

     

    It's not that they won't review any utilities, but they both stick to the much more trusted ones that actually do something useful. Like C|NET, they also of course have ads for some of these companies (gotta' pay them bills with ad revenue), but I also haven't seen any ads for MacKeeper or MacPaw (CleanMyMac) in quite some time. They used to advertise MacKeeper a lot, but as it become apparent how useless and destructive these apps can be, they must have stopped accepting advertising space from them.

  • by Antonio_Fr,

    Antonio_Fr Antonio_Fr Apr 10, 2015 12:25 AM in response to shldr2thewheel
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 10, 2015 12:25 AM in response to shldr2thewheel

    Hi,

     

    Then rather than saying it's useless, please provide a valuable answer ...

    Regards

  • by MadMacs0,

    MadMacs0 MadMacs0 Apr 10, 2015 12:35 AM in response to Antonio_Fr
    Level 5 (4,791 points)
    Apr 10, 2015 12:35 AM in response to Antonio_Fr

    Antonio_Fr wrote:

     

    Then rather than saying it's useless, please provide a valuable answer ...

    Not sure why you are picking on one person as there are probably a dozen others here who have said basically the same thing, some more verbose than others.

     

    And without knowing exactly what you are looking to accomplish, it's impossible to make specific recommendations.  There is no "Cleaner" app for the Mac that is worth paying for, but for some specific issues there is plenty of freeware and even good advise for manually taking care of them. Since this is a very old thread and probably very few of us still monitoring it, unless you find information here that is helpful, you would be much better off starting a new discussion with a detailed statement of what your issues are or what you are trying to accomplish.

  • by petermac87,

    petermac87 petermac87 Apr 10, 2015 1:53 AM in response to Antonio_Fr
    Level 5 (7,402 points)
    Apr 10, 2015 1:53 AM in response to Antonio_Fr

    Antonio_Fr wrote:

     

    Hi,

     

    Then rather than saying it's useless, please provide a valuable answer ...

    Regards

    As this is your only comment on a two year old thread then perhaps you would rather share what technical issues you have in your own thread.

     

    Thank you

     

    Pete

  • by Antonio_Fr,

    Antonio_Fr Antonio_Fr Apr 10, 2015 12:47 PM in response to petermac87
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 10, 2015 12:47 PM in response to petermac87

    Hi Pete,

     

    Sorry, perhaps my answer was a little bit direct. :-)

    I was reading the first posts, and one(and more) answer was of the type "nope useless..." .

    I personally would have answer the same, but with at least one or two recommendations like (CCleaner, CleanMyMac, ...).

     

    The idea of my reaction was :" could you please complete your answer ..." ;-)

     

    Regards,

    Antonio

  • by Allan Eckert,

    Allan Eckert Allan Eckert Apr 10, 2015 12:53 PM in response to Antonio_Fr
    Level 9 (53,462 points)
    Desktops
    Apr 10, 2015 12:53 PM in response to Antonio_Fr

    So you see recommending scamware such as Cleaner and CleanMyMac as better.

     

    I disagree vehemently with that appraisal for both of those are only good for causing problems with Mac and do nothing at all that is worthwhile.

  • by MadMacs0,

    MadMacs0 MadMacs0 Apr 10, 2015 1:17 PM in response to Antonio_Fr
    Level 5 (4,791 points)
    Apr 10, 2015 1:17 PM in response to Antonio_Fr

    Please search the forum for CleanMyMac2 for dozens of dissatisfied users.

  • by angel9090,

    angel9090 angel9090 Jun 4, 2015 5:23 PM in response to petermac87
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 4, 2015 5:23 PM in response to petermac87

    super user=root user=/hacker in cyber words

  • by dwhayman,

    dwhayman dwhayman Jun 18, 2015 8:17 AM in response to shldr2thewheel
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Jun 18, 2015 8:17 AM in response to shldr2thewheel

    What about the new TechTool Pro 8?

  • by Allan Eckert,

    Allan Eckert Allan Eckert Jun 18, 2015 9:17 AM in response to dwhayman
    Level 9 (53,462 points)
    Desktops
    Jun 18, 2015 9:17 AM in response to dwhayman

    It is a waste of money.

  • by Kurt Lang,

    Kurt Lang Kurt Lang Jun 18, 2015 9:29 AM in response to dwhayman
    Level 8 (37,691 points)
    Jun 18, 2015 9:29 AM in response to dwhayman

    Agree with Allan. I used to keep up my upgrades of TechTool Pro and Drive Genius until a couple of versions back. I realized all they did was sit on my drive taking up space. Most of what they do you can do for free using utilities provided with OS X, or with free, or much cheaper third party apps. There are a few things TechTool Pro does that do a very good job slowing your system down and eating up large amounts of disk space if you don't turn them off. And for the most part (like, 99.99999% of the time), you don't need those features anyway.

  • by MadMacs0,

    MadMacs0 MadMacs0 Jun 18, 2015 5:57 PM in response to dwhayman
    Level 5 (4,791 points)
    Jun 18, 2015 5:57 PM in response to dwhayman

    dwhayman wrote:

     

    What about the new TechTool Pro 8?

    I've been a beta tester for MicroMat for many years now, so I'm sure I'm a bit biased, but as a result I'm also thoroughly familiar with it, both good and bad.

     

    It's certainly not a "must have" app to keep around just in case, but if you have some specific needs then it's worth comparing it with similar utilities available today. It is able to repair directory damage that Disk Utility is unable to. DiskWarrior is probably the best such tool for such things, but over the years I've had Drive Genius rescue a disk that none of the other drive utilities I had at the time were able to do. One of the big selling points for TechTool Pro has been the ability to install a bootable eDrive that can be used to run TTP from in an emergency. But Apple now has the Recover HD and several other utilities come with USB thumb drives that can accomplish the same purpose. TTP also has more supplementary tests which are of much lesser importance and as has already been mentioned there are free utilities that can accomplish most all of those and probably not any better than the Apple Hardware Test / Apple Diagnostics.

     

    And I agree that some of the background processes need to be turned off or they will slow your computer down and fill up your drive with deleted files, just in case you later change your mind. Time Machine is probably a better way to solve the latter issue.

  • by Vishal2014,

    Vishal2014 Vishal2014 Jun 19, 2015 3:22 AM in response to Iamawesome997
    Level 2 (202 points)
    Mac OS X
    Jun 19, 2015 3:22 AM in response to Iamawesome997

    Mackeeper is a big No. Stay as far as possible from this utility. You can choose from other set of Mac cleaning utilities which are safer and reliable. Among them are CCleaner, Stellar Speedup Mac, Onyx, Washing Machine from Intego. All of them scans your Mac hard disk drives and pulls out junk files from every corner of Mac hard drive sectors. But what is considered as Junk?

    • Caches
    • Log files
    • System Junks

    You can save good amount of spaces by deleting unnecessary junk files especially Caches. The only disadvantages of removing caches is that the apps may become little bit slow since their stored information gets deleted by removing caches. But new caches will rebuilt with time. There are few other tips to grab free spaces for the HDD:

     

    • Empty Trash folder: Once I had over 5GB of trash stored on my startup drive. Once you get rid of it the drive gets more space to breathe.
    • Remove unwanted downloads from Download folders
    • Organize your desktop. Cut down the no. of useless apps from the desktop. (Just as you clean your room )
    • Run Disk Utility to fix bad disk permissions on OS X drive. Also repair drive if necessary
    • Free up more space by by backing up all the important data to an external drive
    • Archive larger files and save space
    • Manage Login Items
    • Uninstall useless apps. Do clean the leftovers of uninstalled apps.

     

    You can also find and kill all the duplicate files. Check iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie Libraries etc. and remove all xerox files.

  • by petermac87,

    petermac87 petermac87 Jun 19, 2015 3:24 AM in response to Vishal2014
    Level 5 (7,402 points)
    Jun 19, 2015 3:24 AM in response to Vishal2014

    in response to Iamawesome997

     

    The OP hasn't been here for over two years.

     

    Pete

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