Cleaning up my Mac

I'm running OS 10.6.8 on a Mac Mini

I have so much junk and a ton of duplicates on my Mac and I need to clean things up and get rid of a lot of stuff.

I have "Spring Cleaning", "TuneupMyMac" and "Easyduplicatefinder" I have never run any of them.

Any problems with any of these? Is there a better program I should be aware of? Any thoughts on organizing things in general?

Any and all suggestions or comments will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

Any problems with any of these? Is there a better program I should be aware of? Any thoughts on organizing things in general?

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I have a problem with all three. The only program we recommend for optimization and cleaning is OnyX which is free and can be downloaded from here. Make sure you download the version compatible with your version of OS X. Run OnyX in auto mode until you completely understand all its capabilities.

You'll not find many (if any) of the long time OS X users that will be using any of those apps.

If you want to remove stuff from the drive, suggest:
emptying the Trash
uninstalling apps you don't use
get rid of old documents you no longer need
moving pics, music, videos that you don't need on your local drive to a storage drive

All stuff that you personally have put on the drive and nothing to do with finding duplicates, or having some app messing with system files/folders that are better left alone.

If you really need to root out duplicate files, I can personally recommend Tidy Up!. It's not something I recommend for a novice. It has some really great options and can actually examine two files to see if they are dupes by looking at the metadata and even doing a bit-level comparison, if I'm not mistaken. It does not rely strictly on the filename. It will offer previews of its "hits" so you can make the final decision to axe a duplicate or look further. I used it to clean up a bunch of duplicated photos with differing names some time back and it works very well. Again, it's not for a novice and shouldn't be used recklessly. Standard precautions apply... make a backup beforehand!