Q: how to clean your MAC?

First, back up all data immediately, as your boot drive might be failing.

There are a few other possible causes of generalized slow performance that you can rule out easily.

• Reset the System Management Controller.
• If you have many image or video files on the Desktop with preview icons, move them to another folder.
• If applicable, uncheck all boxes in the iCloud preference pane.
• Disconnect all non-essential wired peripherals and remove aftermarket expansion cards, if any.
• Check your keychains in Keychain Access for excessively duplicated items.
• Boot into Recovery mode, launch Disk Utility, and run Repair Disk.

Otherwise, take the steps below when you notice the problem.

Step 1

Launch the Activity Monitor application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Activity Monitor in the icon grid.

Select the CPU tab of the Activity Monitor window.

Select All Processes from the menu in the toolbar, if not already selected.

Click the heading of the % CPU column in the process table to sort the entries by CPU usage. You may have to click it twice to get the highest value at the top. What is it, and what is the process? Also post the values for % User, % System, and % Idle at the bottom of the window.

Select the System Memory tab. What values are shown in the bottom part of the window for Page outs and Swap used?

Next, select the Disk Activity tab. Post the approximate values shown for Reads in/sec and Writes out/sec (not Reads in and Writes out.)

Step 2

If you have more than one user account, you must be logged in as an administrator to carry out this step.

Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Activity Monitor. Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left. If you don't see that menu, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar.

Select the 50 or so most recent entries in the log. Copy them to the Clipboard (command-C). Paste into a reply to this message (command-V). You're looking for entries at the end of the log, not at the beginning.

When posting a log extract, be selective. Don't post more than is requested.

Please do not indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Important: Some personal information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting. That should be easy to do if your extract is not too long.

OnyX is a great utility to get rid of old log files and clear out caches that may be causing issues.

You can hold SHIFT during boot to enter safe mode and see if that clears up the situation.

If it does, you will know its a third party software issue and you should review what applications you have running normally and what is set to run at login (system preferences - Accounts - Login items).

Help here >  Mac troubleshooting: What to do when your computer is too slow | Macworld

FYI...  third party cleaning utilities are not necessary on a Mac.

Your Mac runs maintenance in the background for you >  Mac OS X: About background maintenance tasks

Third party utilities such as Onyx can cause more harm than good.

And make sure thee's enough free space on the starutp disk.

Control click the MacintosHD icon on your Desktop then click Get Info.

You'll see:  Capacity & Available

Make sure there is never less than 15% free disk space. Less can slow the drive down.

Carolyn Samit wrote:

 

FYI...  third party cleaning utilities are not necessary on a Mac.

 

Your Mac runs maintenance in the background for you >  Mac OS X: About background maintenance tasks

FYI.... those tasks do not clear cache or log data.

In fact, Apple specifically recommends you use third party cleaning applications

Use a third-party application

Some third-party applications may allow you to run these tasks whenever you wish. Four examples include:

• Macaroni by Thomas Harrington
• Mac Janitor by Brian R. Hill
• CronMaster by Dan Klein
• weRclean by Parental Advisory

You can search for these or other solutions at VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker.com/).

Third party utilities such as Onyx can cause more harm than good.

<Edited by Host>

MacMiniPro-

providing pull quotes without providing a link to the full article is not helpful.

Please provide the URL of the article you are pulling from.

There is a -kill switch in Usenet, MacJanitor was back around 2006 and Macaroni is also obsolete, as is any more junk science just use mute button.

The hatter-

Please provide the URL of the article you are pulling from. Usenet was not mentioned in any of the posts in this thread or links within.

Grant Bennet-Alder-

The link to the article was in the quote of Carolyn Samit in the post.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

Third party utilities such as Onyx can cause more harm than good.

Can you please provide some references to back up that opinion? I have never had any trouble with it using OnyX for several years.

You quoted a support article completely out of context. That passage only refers to OS X 10.4 and 10.5. The "background maintenance tasks" are vestiges of FreeBSD, and it makes not the slightest difference whether they even run or not, unless you leave the computer running for years or decades without rebooting it. Apple does not recommend "Onyx" or any other third-party "utilities," and neither does anybody else who knows what he's talking about. The only function of those "utilities" is to create time-wasting busywork and to make it easy for non-technical users to wreck their system.

Apple does not recommend "Onyx" or any other third-party "utilities,"

The link shows otherwise when Apple suggested third party cleaning apps. The specifically listed examples are only that, examples.

The only function of those "utilities" is to create time-wasting busywork and to make it easy for non-technical users to wreck their system.

Plus to clean out hundreds of megabytes of useless logs taking up space.

Those logs accumulate no matter how frequently a Mac is restarted.

If you make an effort to improve your reading comprehension and learn something about the Mac platform -- for example, by actually reading the periodic scripts and figuring out for yourself what they do, instead of just making it up -- then you might start to be able to give useful advice on this site, and eventually some people might start to take your opinions seriously. That hasn't happened yet.

My reading is fine, there is no reason for you to insult me (Violation of TOS rule 2:2) because I do not agree with your opinion. Why can't you accept what Apple has written down on their support site?

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2319?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
Use a third-party application

There is reason to dispute what you say when you omit references and take statements out of context.

The part of the article you are enjoying quoting applies only to 10.4 and 10.5, where shutting down the computer might keep the built-in maintenance tasks from running as unix intended.

The article clearly states that those utilities may be helpful to run the built-in cron tasks at a time of your choosing in those versions of Mac OS X. They are not recommended in any way, and the article includes a disclaimer at the bottom reiterating that third party software is not recommended.