Every year or so, I move a year (or two) of photos to an external drive (while also backing up my iPhoto library to another drive via Time Machine) to reclaim some of my hard-drive capacity. My two biggest offenders in terms of taking up hard-drive space are iTunes and iPhoto, which does not come as a surprise. AppZapper is free for the first five zaps, after which you'll need to pay $12.95. With it, you can uninstall apps and the related files. Mac OS X lacks anything resembling an uninstaller, but AppZapper is one such app. There are files associated with every application you install, however, and they are left behind when you simply move an application to the Trash. Move them to the Trash to reclaim some hard-drive space. If there are apps in there you can't remember installing, odds are you can live without them. It's never a bad idea to take a gander at your Applications folder on occasion. Here, you can check off items across six categories, clicking Execute to delete the cache of the checked items, freeing up space on your hard drive. For our spring cleaning purposes, I will direct you to the Cleaning tab at the top of the app. It's a fairly extensive program, much of which I will not cover here. To clear the cache that your Mac's various applications and processes have stashed on your hard drive, install the free utility, OnyX. This will run a lengthy scan of your desktop, making repairs as necessary. Make sure you are viewing the First Aid tab and then click the Repair Disk button in the lower-right corner. Your Mac has a utility to root out evil, and there are a handful of free apps that will also help you clean up your hard drive.įirst, to start cleaning your hard drive, open your Mac's built-in Disk Utility program and click on your hard drive in the left panel.

I'm fairly certain there are files and applications on your Mac that you no longer need. The biggest chore of your Mac housekeeping efforts is reclaiming space on your hard drive. You can't delete any files with Disk Inventory X, but the app is a good first step in identifying which apps are eating up the most space. The bigger the block, the more space it's taking up. Run it and it scans your drive for a few minutes before spitting out a graphical representation of the applications on your hard drive. Similarly, to get a picture of what's taking up the most space on your hard drive, install the free Disk Inventory X utility. Also, I found that the sluggish iTunes isn't nearly the resource hog I thought it was. Perhaps it's time for me to abandon Firefox and use Chrome exclusively. After watching the Activity Monitor for a while this morning, I see that Firefox generally takes up more CPU resources and more than triple the memory resources. The numbers are constantly fluctuating, but they show you the amount of CPU and memory resources each app is using. If your Mac acts like it needs a nap every afternoon, when you are at the height of multitasking, there is an easy way to see which of your open applications is using the most system resources. Step 2: Identify and eradicate offending apps Uncheck the apps you don't need at startup. Go to System Preferences, then to Users & Groups and then click on the Login Items tab to see a list of the apps that open when you boot your Mac. Many applications by default open automatically at startup. If your Mac is slow to boot up, the problem may be it simply has too many applications to open that it can't load the OS in a timely fashion.

For Macs, it's easy: grab an external drive and run Time Machine. If your Mac struggles to keep pace from time to time, the following are some ways you can clean and speed it up.īefore you engage in any maintenance, it's always a good idea to back up your data. I see the spinning beach ball more than I care to. Sure, the amount of garbage I've put on it since purchase can't match the amount of crap I found in my attic and basement, but it is slowing down some. I wanted to continue our cleaning momentum so I turned to my MacBook Pro.

Now our attic isn't as overwhelming, and our basement is less creepy. We celebrated each run to the dump as we literally lightened our load. My wife and I recently cleaned out our attic and basement, throwing out and donating six years' worth of accumulated clutter.

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