Clean up software to speed up computer

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Level 1

10 points

Clean up software to speed up computer

Hi,
I have 3 mac in my home. 2 of them are about a year old and 1 is about 4 years old. Over the years when I have replaced my older machines, I did the option where I transferred my old mac to my new one. My fear is that it also transferred a lot of non-used stuff that may be slowing down my computers. Recently my son who has a 2010 macbook pro noticed his machine was getting very sluggish. I did a repair permissions on the machine. Just wondering if there is any other software that anyone can recommend to clean up the junk and speed up the computer. Back in my PC days there were tons of them but most of them made the computer worse. Any thoughts?

Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Mar 17, 2011 10:19 AM

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Answer 1

The hatter

Level 9

60,990 points

Mar 17, 2011 10:28 AM in response to sseligson

Clone the disk drive as bootable backup.

Invest in a good 3rd party disk repair utility (Alsoft, Prosoft, Micromat) in addition to using Apple Disk Utility to REPAIR your drive. Not just permissions.

I just went through mine, to save space and not to speed things up but using a very small SSD, and had a lot of old prefs and such, programs I never use and that were often from 3-5 yrs old.

As long as you have plenty of disk space, and all the applications and drivers are compatible with 10.6.6 and your Macs, I don't think there is a reason.

You can check Activity Monitor to see if any are PPC/PowerPC rather than Intel processes, or if any use Rosetta.

I feel like clone + format + restore from time to time cleans up temp log files, caches, organizes folders and directories, consolidates free space so it isn't fragmented, and insures the disk drive can be retested and has a good directory and partition table.

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Answer 2

Mar 17, 2011 10:57 AM in response to sseligson

You shouldn't need to format your hard drive.

A lot of times sluggish performance is caused by large caches and corrupt font caches. These are easy to fix (read: clean out) and it can be done a number of ways (i.e.: through the terminal or through a GUI app). Corrupt cache files are, IME, the biggest general performance suck besides lack of RAM.

One of my favorite utilities is Onyx. Get it here: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11582/onyx

If you run that under Automation mode and select all checkboxes it will clean your user and system caches as well as your font caches, repair permissions, etc. It's a great maintenance tool.

Another thing to check would be your login items in the Accounts System Preference. Extraneous login items will affect computer performance, especially if they are using Rosetta. Removing the ones you don't need would be a good place to start.

New apps can be resource hogs, I wouldn't recommend running any system with less than 4 GB of RAM nowadays. Sad but true. Oh how I miss you 16MB ram days...

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Answer 3

baltwo

Level 9

62,362 points

Mar 17, 2011 11:28 AM in response to sseligson

See:

Mac Maintenance Quick Assist,
Mac OS X speed FAQ,
Speeding up Macs,
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
Essential Mac Maintenance: Get set up,
Essential Mac Maintenance: Rev up your routines,
Maintaining OS X,
Five Mac maintenance myths, and
Myths of required versus not required maintenance for Mac OS X for information.

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