Let me see if I can add a few words about this to hopefully help you make up your mind.
I've been using Macs exclusively at home since 1986 and have never found a need to run any utility in a "routine maintenance" mode. I have tried many over the years and own a few, but have only found them to be useful when I know there is a specific problem.
richard583a wrote:
.. "defragmentation". ?
Now done effectively by the OS. It's not perfect, it won't optimize the placement of your files, but as long as you keep enough free space for it do it's work, fragmentation should never be an issue. If you feel you need to polish the apple, so to speak, then you might find iDefrag to be worthwhile. Personally, I've never found a need.
"Junk files" ? ( .. as referred to by this program.)
I see that consists of:
- Binaries Cutter
- Cache Cleaner
- Languages Cutter
- Logs Cleaner
I got really burned by a "Language Cutter" once when they first came out. It disabled at least half a dozen applications causing some of them not to run at all and others to refuse to update until I removed them and replaced them from source. The latter also had me on the phone to the customer support to explain why I needed them to allow me to re-use serial number. All told, it was the better part of a month before I recovered from that and I you won't find me doing that or removing unused code to save such a small amount of space. Now in those days, hard drives were relatively expensive, so saving a bit of space was much more important than it is today. It's true that many of those utilities have become smarter about what applications don't like to be touched, but if I need more space I'd far prefer to replace the hard drive or off-load some little used files to an external than take a chance on corrupting an application.
The OS looks after all of it's logs periodically and most don't even require that the old Unix maintenance scripts be run any more. There are probably some applications out there capable of crating large logs, but I haven't found any of them to be an issue. If I did I'd probably contact the developer to either find out why or have them use the built in tools to rotate them periodically.
Cache cleaning can be a good thing. In fact, just yesterday I found that I had to clear my Safari cache in order for the new Flash Player to update. First time that's happened. All caches are there to speed up your computing experience, whether it be starting up, logging in, browsing or whatever. They save you significant amounts of time in having to lookup or re-download the same information time after time. So if you routinely remove them, everything will slow down for you until they can be rebuilt over varying amounts of time. But caches can become corrupt and that's when they need to be rebuilt. There is no red flag waving when this happens, you just have to get a feel for when things suddenly don't seem to be the same. Of course that could be caused by an Internet problem or Wi-Fi interference, so I won't tell you it's easy to tell when cache pruning is necessary. I would also suggest you target the caches you empty and not take a meat axe to all of them at once. OnyX is the free utility that gets recommended most of the time here, but there are others that are equally good.
I have to run take care of something, but I'll be back to talk about uninstalling apps, which you didn't mention.
