Healthy Mac, happy user
Bored of your slow Mac? There are a bunch of ways you can maintain the Mac with several built-in tools or options. The majority of users do not need a specific routine maintenance, but if you want to take more precautions for your Mac or speed it up, you could use one of these two really useful tools that are not built-in simple apps and they can do a lot for you.
1. CleanMyMac 3 – macpaw.com
This is a tool that offers some basic maintenance functionality. I’ve listed all of them below but I’m giving details only for those that I think are more important than others:
Smart Cleanup: Complete Mac cleanup
Dashboard: Real-time Mac performance
Health: Mac health alerts
System Junk: Clean your system from all junk files remained. Clean up unnecessary language files that you will never use, caches, log files and universal binaries that are sets of files that come with an application package. These files allow the app to run on two different types of Mac architectures, Intel and PowerPC. Your Mac only uses one of these two architectures, so the app files for the other architecture aren’t necessary. Also clean up development junk, broken login items, broken preferences and iOS Photo Cache.
Uninstaller: Remove applications entirely. Mac’s default drag & drop to trash feature does not uninstall always uninstall correctly the apps over your system. You end up with tons of leftover pieces of deleted apps. This gets rid of entire applications, including all the extra files that go along with them.
Maintenance: Optimize, repair and reindex. Specifically, run maintenance scripts, repair disk permissions, verify startup disk, mail speedup, rebuild launch services database, reindex spotlight and flush DNS Cache.
Photo Junk: Photos are gigabytes
Large & Old Files: Discover what’s wasting space. Discover all the old files you’ve forgotten about on your hard drive. It scans folders and disk drives to show you the files that haven’t been opened in a long time. Why hang onto stuff you never use? Decide what’s worth keeping.
Privacy: Clean activity on Mac
iTunes Junk: Clean up iTunes. It cleans out all sorts of junk in iTunes that most people don’t even know about. You can clean up outdated iOS device backups, broken downloads, and other useless data.
Mail Attachments: Clean up mail
Trash Bins: Empty all trashes. It finds all your Trash bins: external drive trashes, Photos trash, Mail trash, and other app-specific trashes — and then empties them all out.
Extensions: Manage your add-ons. It gathers all your extensions, widgets, and plugins into one simple control panel. You can then choose to disable, reset, or even remove them from your Mac. It’s all of your fun, little extras huddled together in one place.
Shredder: Securely erase files
CleanMyMac Menu: Notifications and updates
2. MacKeeper – mackeeper.com
This is an alternative a tool with really useful and similar functionalities as the previous one, but I would recommend this only if your Mac needs to “be revived from the dead”. Here’s the list of features:
Your Personal Technical Assistant: Every user has 24/7 access to Apple Certified Support Professionals
Find & Fix: Get a direct line between your Mac and your personal Apple Certified Support Professional, who can scan your Mac for any risky items and fix them remotely.
Memory Cleaner: Automatically optimizes and monitors your Mac’s RAM memory while you are performing your daily tasks. Best solution after you have finished using intensive apps or games.
Fast Cleanup: Quickly remove junk files (such as temporary caches, logs, unused language packages and legacy application parts) that take up hard drive space and slow down your Mac.
Internet Security Features: Protect your Mac from phishing scams, malware, spyware, adware, viruses and identity theft while you’re using the Internet.
Login Items: Take control of how fast your Mac boots up by controlling which applications launch every time you start it.
Update tracker: Make sure you never miss out on any important security patches or software upgrades for most of your applications.
Find, Assign, Recover and Backup: It is always great to have essential tools ready and at hand.
Files Finder: Quickly search for and find any lost or misplaced file, even if you don’t know which folder it is in.
Security: State-of-the-Art Algorithms to keep your personal data safe from prying eyes. Make your personal information invisible to other users and even make it disappear completely so that it can never be recovered.
Data Encryptor: Make your restricted files absolutely invisible to anyone without the right password, protecting even your most sensitive information. Protected files and folders will not appear in Finder and cannot be located or retrieved.
Shredder: Securely delete files and folders that you don’t ever want to be recovered. A state-of-the-art deletion process such as Shredder is a sure-fire way to prevent sensitive information you no longer need to access from falling into the wrong hands.
Use those tools on your own responsibility and remember not to make deep changes that are not necessary! Third-party apps may seem as the “hand of god” in which if you overuse them only bad things might come out. Read each feature before you do anything and give access only to those which fit your system needs.