I would like to find a proven Mac cleanup utility to run on my MacBook. Preferably free one but am willing to pay for something that really works and is transferable when the time comes to replace my MacBook.

What exactly are you wanting to clean up?

Any junk or clutter that might be slowing it down.

Without details: OnyX (free) and Daisy Disk - $10.

Onyx

Daisy Disk

I have been using something called "CleanMyMac". I haven't noticed it doing any harm. Does it do any good? How can you tell?

Does your Macbook have an SSD drive? If not, SSD prices are pretty good and it's a worthwhile performance upgrade.

No SSD, it's a 2012 MacBook Pro and after 6 years, I know there has junk and clutter on it. I remember when I had a PC, I used to do system defrag and it would help it perform better.

Here's a Samsung 500gb SSD for $87; otherwise opt for the 250gb.

https://www.amazon.com/Samsung...70&sr=8-2&ref=sr_1_2

If you upgraded to a SSD, you'd definitely notice the difference.

quote:

Originally posted by P229 357SIG Man:
No SSD, it's a 2012 MacBook Pro and after 6 years, I know there has junk and clutter on it. I remember when I had a PC, I used to do system defrag and it would help it perform better.

None. I have a gen 1 MacBook Air (old!), and have no need for a “cleaner”. I do power it off once a day to kill zombie processes.

I use the free version of CCleaner.

Yesterday after an afternoon of watching college football and surfing, I closed my browser (that in itself deletes a bunch of clutter) and ran CCleaner. The result was over 750 mB of junk erased.

The Mac will most stuff on its own if you leave it on overnight every now and then. I used to run specific scripts, but they became built in after about Lion.

2014 MBP still kicking ass with no issues.

Never done a thing aside from back it up and upgrade OS when appropriate.

Shit it runs faster than my new company provided 2018 iMac, which I pretty much never use because it sucks ballz.

quote:

Originally posted by P229 357SIG Man:
No SSD, it's a 2012 MacBook Pro and after 6 years, I know there has junk and clutter on it. I remember when I had a PC, I used to do system defrag and it would help it perform better.

Defrag on a windows box was from back in the days of FAT32 for your file system.
FAT32 was semi-jokingly named "splatter on the platter" due to how it handled writes. As a result, the data for 1 file could get spread out drastically over the entire surface of the disk.
Running degrag would move those bits and pieces around until (ideally) the entire file was all together in one stripe - thus drastically reducing seek time and improving system performance.

More modern file systems (NTFS, EXT4, APFS) all handle the writes way better than FAT32 did - thus making defrag unnecessary.

I have a 2012 MacBook Air with 8GB RAM and a 500GB SSD. I also have a 2017 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD.

I rarely find it necessary to "clean" my Macs, but on occasion I do free up some disk space. CCleaner works, as does a freebie from TrendMicro called Dr. Cleaner.

I reformat and do a fresh install every 6 months or so. Total overkill, but I enjoy doing it. Kind of a detail strip for a Mac.

ETA - I keep bootable clones around just to be safe.

Mac OS X is basically a Unix. I’ve never seen a Unix that needed a defrag utility. It’s a different type of file system. There are log files that might take up space, but the operating system now has built in scripts to keep those reasonable. There’s no Registry to get flakey either so no cleaning required there.

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
Mac OS X is basically a Unix. I’ve never seen a Unix that needed a defrag utility. It’s a different type of file system. There are log files that might take up space, but the operating system now has built in scripts to keep those reasonable. There’s no Registry to get flakey either so no cleaning required there.

This 100%. Don't mess with any Mac "cleaner" utilities. macOS/OS X does not need it. I occasionally run OmniDiskSweeper, a small free utility that does nothing but scan your disk and report the sizes of all folders. If you find a folder that is unusually large, you can drill down to see what files/folders are the culprits. Also, once a year, I do a clean install (disk wiped/formatted anew) of the new OS. This was also my habit when I used to run Windows (new OS version gets a clean install). If you have an SSD boot disk on your Mac, you also get Apple's new file system (APFS), which is even better at maintaining your disk.

First, you have to get out of the Windows mentality that you need a dozen different "utilities" to keep the OS running. With MacOS, you rarely need any of that stuff.

quote:

Originally posted by jbcummings:
Mac OS X is basically a Unix. I’ve never seen a Unix that needed a defrag utility. It’s a different type of file system. There are log files that might take up space, but the operating system now has built in scripts to keep those reasonable. There’s no Registry to get flakey either so no cleaning required there.

There is one exception to this: Applications you have deleted leave preference files scattered about, deep in system folders. There are some utilities that can dig in and identify them and remove them (if you approve, and have some idea what something like 'com.apple.somefile.anotherlist.plist' do and what program they're associated with. Once you remove all these leftover files, you may have reclaimed a few hundred kilobytes of disk space. Not worth the effort, for the most part.

Thanks for your input guys, I might look into a SSD upgrade as suggested by lkdr1989