I want to clean up my system -- MacKeeper?

I wouldn't allow MacKeeper anywhere near any of my machines - not sure why you thought I might. I do run DW if the disk directory is 40% or more out of whack.

MacKeeper is too expensive. You can find free clean software anywhere, such as Onyx, MacCleaning, etc.

Mackeeper is the worst software I have ever used. I just used the trial and it deleted core files from my system. I had to reinstall all of my software! All of my webpages now show in a plain text format too. Don't get it.

well, I accidently bought this crap thing last time and I just got my refund back..

1 great one that I always keep around

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/25276/appcleaner (make sure you use "SmartDelete" in the preferences, it will make things even easier)

and 2 when I feel like cleaning the logs and stuff, I download the latest Onyx version

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

For duplicates I use Media Pro (which I also use to catalogue and organize my photos) but that's a paid program so you might look around for a better option. I personally found that Media Pro does a great job sorting out the duplicates even though it's not meant for it.

Good luck ~

PS of course reinstalling a fresh Mac OS and selectively picking what goes back in your Mac is the cleanest solution.

PSS MacKeeper is crap

I ended up on this thread looking for solutions to a MacKeeper problem- I'm going to repost the novel I've written in a more appropriate forum because I realized after the fact that this in Snow Leopard. But I hope no one minds if I post some of what I'm dealing with. One, hopefully it helps someone avoid the headache and wasted hours I've spent, at least in part because of MacKeeper. I wish I had heard some of this last summer.

The other reason is selfish- maybe someone here will have some good advice.

One thing I would love to know is how I can learn to read the logs and reports. I'm not a complete rube about computers, and the one good thing about the hours of time I've spent in the last year is that I rediscovered my inner computer geek that had been busy doing other things since my early 20s. I'm so grateful and excited to be have places like this where I can learn- and I've become obsessed a bit. 😉

That being said- I struggle greatly to decipher what my Mac is telling me and I find that cutting and pasting the logs is only nominally effective because it's difficult to know what the important parts are and what is just normal business...

So any advice on that front would be awesome! I'd love to know how to fish for myself if you know what I mean.

Here is the post I wrote, sorry it's so long. I don't know what's important and what's not...

I feel like such an idiot! I had unholy **** for the last 8 months I had my last MBP and the whole time I was using MacKeeper more and more because I just didn't know what else to do as things got worse and worse. I was pretty sure things went completely south when MacKeeper deleted some Microsoft Alphabet (not alphabet, but the correct word escapes me) with an unpronounceable name that is somehow vital... But I blamed myself and kept slugging away- except for the days and weeks when I just avoided my MBP all together. I finally got a new MBP in Jan and it's been **** again. Everything was great at first but I ended up with a bunch of duplicate files trying to move everything over manually because it was the only way I could get anything on the new computer. MacKeeper wanted me to buy a new license and $79 is pretty steep so I just used the trial version to get an idea of where some of the duplicates were all nested inside each other.

Then I was reading graphic designer's blog about 10 days ago and he really laid out the case against MacKeeper and it's deceptive practices- something which I had noticed, but when I downloaded it originally 2 years ago I was coming back to Mac after 12 years and I had nothing to go on but all the praise MK gets from MacWorld or MacLife or whatever... I'm much more cautious than I used to be. So I unistalled MacKeeper, the trial version of which was just hanging out on my MBP. My problem was that MK was always what I used to make sure I got rid of every piece of something, so I took some advice and downloaded AppCleaner and sure enough it found about 10 files, some of which didn't even say MacKeeper but were linked to Zeobit.

I should say that all of this was done because my MBP seemed SO slow, and weird things were happening with iPhoto. It kept crashing and having to be rebuilt, and the file structure kept getting messed up. Same with Mail.

After three weeks of rebuilding and labeling my 12,000 photos and screwing with Mail, I had decided that the reason I was getting delayed movements and slow apps is because: My new MBP only has 4 GB of memory and I also purchased a 27" Cinema recently... I had always planned on upgrading I've just been too busy screwing with things.

Mar 15 20:13:37 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper[77513]): Exited with code: 1

Mar 15 20:13:37 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Mar 15 20:15:17 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper[77525]): posix_spawn("/Applications/MacKeeper.app/Contents/Resources/MacKeeper Helper.app/Contents/MacOS/MacKeeper Helper", ...): No such file or directory

Mar 15 20:15:17 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper[77525]): Exited with code: 1

Mar 15 20:15:17 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Mar 15 20:16:57 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper[77539]): posix_spawn("/Applications/MacKeeper.app/Contents/Resources/MacKeeper Helper.app/Contents/MacOS/MacKeeper Helper", ...): No such file or directory

Mar 15 20:16:57 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper[77539]): Exited with code: 1

Mar 15 20:16:57 Marcs-MBPQ4 com.apple.launchd.peruser.502[155] (com.zeobit.MacKeeper.Helper): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds

Most OS X logs are pretty useless for the average (nd above average) user. For the most part, logs are meant for programmers and/or sysadmins with a deep understanding of the OS.

12,000 photos is a lot, plain and simple. I'm not sure iPhoto will handle 12,000 photos well on any system. More memory should help, but I'm not sure what the realistic number of photos is for iPhoto to handle geven 8 GB of memory. MacKeeper will not help you.

Thank you for the response- I think I was having a bit of a meltdown 😉

I've lost a lot of sleep lately over this stuff.

iPhoto is rated for 250,000 images.

That was one of my first thoughts, also. I'm planning on splitting my library up as soon as I get things straightend out... I think. I was going to do that last Fall and someone on here who knew a lot more about iPhoto than me told me it was a mistake to do so...

Whatever the case, it doesn't seem to be what's causing the problems- it's less than 18 Gbs and isn't something I have running all the time.

As to the logs- I know most of it is beyond me, I just wish I could educate myself better to be able to A: have a general idea what the issue is so I can either fix it, learn how to fix it, or at least not make it worse.

B: Know where to post here and what to be asking in a concise way. I get on here and read all the time, but I don't really know what to ask usually.

And finally, I find it hard to know who to listen to... The last thing I read that I believe is that Mac's really don't need the kind of maintence and cleaning that Wintels do, and that MacKeeper duped me into thinking it did... But I know there's no "one" solution so I just wish I could gain some insight into what's really happening with my machine.

Part of it, of course, is just that SO many things are changing so rapidly that it's hard to know where the root of a problem is. Cloud, Lion, Apps, Yahoo, Google, etc... Hard to isolate problems sometimes.

Guess I'm hoping there's some level of competency I can gain. If not, I'm at the mercy of troubleshooters and Geek Squad or Apples who are often awesome, but are inconvenient and sometimes very unhelpful.

You clearly know a lot from all of the points you have 😉

Is that from professional experience or something else? (if you don't mind my asking)

And BTW- sorry if I seem argumentative. I know you're telling me not to bust my chops on it...

The 250,000 image rating is something I've never heard, but that doesn't mean much. It's just from personal experience that having a few thousand images can make iPhoto slow down a bit, so I'm just imagining that 12,000 iages would make the average Mac slow down a bit more.

As to the logs, I've looked at them more than once in hopes of finding a clue, and I did not mean to infer anything about your level of competence....logs are pretty cryptic to me as well.

If I had 12,000 photos, I'd consider archiving some of them, making a couple backups, and use iPhoto for just a few thousand.

No worries! I didn't take it that way at all- and I AM incompetent LOL

I agree with you- I downloaded a program to let me manage multiple iPhoto libraries last night, just hadn't gotten to it before this all kicked off. I think his point, was that it can become confusing keeping up with what is where. But I guess what keeps giving me pause through all of this is that my old MBP was a mid 2009 2.66 with a shared graphics card and it didn't have a problem unless I tried to do too many things at once. I think the key is that once they are indexed, it's not like your messing with them all at once. But some strange things happened with Photostream as I was cleaning up the files- sometimes it would suddenly start importing 200 files I had deleted and then the dates were changed and that caused havoc...

This computer was a store display at Best Buy and a great deal- I really didn't want to buy a new one but I had an accident and had no choice. I thought I was being clever, but I think I might have made a mistake... They're NO help, that's for sure!

Have a nice evening.