Question: Q: PLEASE HELP!! EtreCheck & DriveDX contradict - EC replace HDD with SSD, but I have an SSD? Other issues too, DDX = everything OK

no kidding. i am aware of other apps like this.and i avoid them. i thought we had entered a new changed era. ive used it for a year or more without issue and it helped a lot regarding leftover files. i know macs are good at self policing themselves, but it's also quite true that there is loads and loads of junk leftover from things these days. i mean like am extremely polluted library folder(s) and application leftovers of programs i hadnt seen in years that consumed enormous space, and launch agents i couldnt find through normal means....

it's just not true anymore that it takes care of itself entirely, and, unless you know all locations of all files that are silently installed, or how to find those locations, and you manually remove them yourself, AND know what's okay and not okay to delete, when, and in what order, the mac of today slowly warps (not nearly to the same degree as WinDoze though). I feel like a clean reformat and fresh OS install once per year is sort of necessary nowadays because of that.

that's especially true if you start adding in more complex things than basic app store apps (which still leave remnants behind that pollute sometimes), like things developers might use, or animators, video editors, audio work, Virtual Machines, etc. im afraid that i do all of those things - pretty often. and i dont have time to learn how to restore ideally the state of things each and every app or extensions or plug in or etc. i dont think there is an easy solution?

i wonder if clean my mac x still is good but perhaps putting certain things off limits? it does a much better job at deleting apps than dragging to the trash or relying on developer supplied uninstallers (as they often don't exist). what do you think? say no to "flush dns cache, free up ram?"

i find it's useful for malware, quick overview for file storage and space, uninstalling apps, controlling startup programs and launch agents, but maybe the "speed up your mac" stuff is where i got too trusting (against common sense). i just dont want to spend hours wasting time on Google again trying random things to get rid of eventual "other files" eating up half my disk, all of which probably do even more harm to my machine cause i dont know what im doing and there's no universal source for answers and require lots and lots of guess and check and trial and error.

any recommendations?

may i ask, too, what was the indicator that showed you that my clean my mac x ruined the system? it always worked fine and well, even, and i had just installed sketchier stuff for the last few weeks and am surprised clean my mac x is the culprit and definitely wanna learn why. thanks!

apptamer i found necessary too sometimes. fresh install, first thing you do is download dropbox and open it, and it'll raise your cpu to boiling temperatures and drain your battery in 15 minutes until all files are synced. (i am therefore migrating away). but without app tamer, id just shorten lifespan significantly more than with it it even for this one thing

awesome. thank you. yea....apptamer i think maybe only works now for one core, or something...cause it does cut it back, but "stop app completely" no longer stops it completely, which....i don't care to figure out.

I do like a lot of things customized, yes. I wonder if I shouldn't post a list of helper things and see if anybody doesn't maybe know a better way than to have an app constantly running. But there are a lot of things I think are necessary to get around limiting "features" of macOS, like Hyperswitch, Default Folder X, TextExpander, Keyboard Maestro, Soundify, AudioJack, and various other things that let you do useful things that speed up workflow dramatically.

As far as Chrome.....I do know this is a resource hog. And I deleted it and tried to use Safari for a couple months. I ended up sort of being forced back into using Chrome, and I came back reluctantly and not happy about it. Safari is fast and lean, for sure, but it's because it's not really capable of very much. I grew so annoyed with how limited it was. Maybe you know a better way or browser or something?

I've gone through what I went back to Chrome for and listed them here:

0) Brancher - the most useful change to the internet since GUI browsers (a history "tree" so I can move around my browsing history actually and not forced into a linear forward <--> backward only)

1) Add Pinyin - Chinese Zero to Hero Reader - This extension annotates all Chinese text on a page with pinyin spelling above each character.

2) Clip to DEVONthink - Clip selected web content to your DEVONthink database.

3) Email Privacy Protector - Blocks email trackers while allowing me to choose if I want to allow the tracker on each individual email in Gmail.

4) Enable Copy - Allow selecting, copying, pasting and right clicking in some restricted pages. (useful for academia and government websites especially)

5) Fatkun Batch Download Image - image batch download extension.You can filter by resolution or link. (I collect artwork digitally)

6) Free Email Tracker by cloudHQ - super, super useful. works on chrome only, only desktop. but replying to threads started on desktop chrome from iPhone continues the tracking.

7) Gmail Message Preview - nice, but I could probably do without it if I must "settle", though I'd prefer to spend another few thousand dollars on hardware so I can use it the way I want and not feel restricted

8) Honey - saves money sometimes while shopping

9) Magic Actions for YouTube - YouTube infinitely nicer

10) Smile Always - Always redirects amazon links to AmazonSmile to donate to my favorite organizations

11) Tampermonkey - This, I suppose I can turn off except when I rarely use it, but it is useful to make websites do what you will with them when necessary

12) WhenX for Google Search - tells you when you visited each link last on Google Search Results. Mind boggling why this isn't built into Google anyways, in my opinion.

13) Wikibuy from Capital One - gives me cheaper options when shopping on Amazon and stuff. like honey, but instead of coupons, shows me alternate store links and prices to save me shopping around

14) Zhongzhong: An Improved Chinese dictionary - on hovering over any chinese characters, a window pops up with its pinyin pronunciation, the character's meaning in English (see attached camera video clip if u have interest) https://youtu.be/H5mc80_SmOQ

15) Hover Zoom+ - allows you to see tiny images and avatars b y mousing over them

16) User Agent Switcher - can switch to any other desktop or mobile browser super easily

17) Session Buddy - i have different auto-loading tabs for school, development, graphic, animation, video, or audio work periods. very nice.

18) Raindrop.io - to make bookmarks not ****

Those are the installed extensions. Until just barely recently, Safari couldn't even duplicate tabs without a strange key combination i couldn't ever remember or a plug-in installed which, surprisingly, existed. Safari has no "Search Google for this Image" in the right click menu, and it has no "Translate this into English" in the right click menu. Keep in mind that I'm missing a lot of extensions as I'm recovering from the first time I tossed Chrome.

For my purposes, Safari was just a huge pain and felt more like a "prop" resembling a browser than an actual browser I could use. I'd like to abandon Chrome if I could!!! Opera, idk. Firefox I also use sometimes for things like logging into multiple facebooks in the same browser at the same time and also for logging out of gmails one at a time and keeping them grouped with their particular paired facebook accounts and each identity associated with them. But I don't usually use Firefox, and since they reloaded it, there aren't really very many extensions that are useful yet from what I've seen.

Thanks for your help. Any comments on this are not required but appreciated.

I don't think there's any way for Safari to keep track of history so that you can search all your content, either, which is the only use I've ever had for "history", since I don't recall names/domains of websites nearly 100% of the time I'm Googling through things.