It follows that cache clearing may be a dumb idea the majority of the time. As with fragmentation, it may not be the cause of the majority of problems. But it's only a smart idea if a bad cache was the cause of a problem. That's when it's a dumb idea.īut bad caches can cause problems, so if that is the case, clearing caches is a smart idea. The second one was text becoming partially garbled, clearing out the font caches fixed that.Īs with a lot of things, 'it depends.' Caches are there to help things go faster, so if the computer is functioning normally, the normal effect of clearing caches is to slow down app and OS startup times, font loading times, etc. One was a website looking/reacting funny, deleting the browser cache fixed that. Really? I do remember at least two instances in my personal computing experience where clearing the right caches solved the problem (ie, the cache was corrupted). And as gaussian blur pointed out, you never ever want to defragment an SSD (Almost all Apple laptops are now SSD-based, so this is important).Īs far back as ten years ago, a disk utility expert listed about a number of technical reasons defragging was generally unneeded (on Macs): But multiple aspects of modern file systems and OSs mean that fragmentation is nearly a non-issue today. Yeah, defragging was useful about for the disks of about 15-20 years ago. By 10.7/10.8 I had dropped the use of just about all third-party maintenance programs.

Defragging isn't the panacea that people think it is, and is not needed on a Mac except in very unusual circumstances.īy the time Snow Leopard came about, many of the maintenance routines that 'power users' had become accustomed to running had become integrated into OS X and automated. I remember when I maintained industrial computer printers which were accessed via dedicated Windows-based computers, that we had a 'Defrag' program which worked wonders.ĭoubtful. What problems are you having that you think you need to clean it? Is there anything reliable to clean up an iMac running 10.6.8 Snow Leopard? One is malware, which makes itself known by popups and the other is 'cleaner' utility and a not very good one and totally unnecessary. There are actually two things called MacKeeper. SO - went to OnyxMac and saw a 'Free Download' of 'MacSpeed Scan' soi i tried that & the download was 'MacKeeper' - I immediately put it in Trash but this gives me NO confidence in Onyx!

Several replies suggested using 'Onyx' to clean up a Mac & (maybe ?) speed it up a bit. You're wise to be suspicious and even wiser to check before trying it. It's malware, as is anything that is pushed via popups. I keep getting popups advertising MacKeeper - which makes me suspicious, so I searched 'MacKeeper' on this forum and it sounds like a bad idea.

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