cleaning up mac

[indapino22]

hello everyone..im a soon to be switcher overer, simply because i want to try something new and have heard great things about mac. now on to my question.

on my pc i sometimes "clean" it, by clean i mean deleting temp internet files, temp files, cookies, history, internet cache and other issues that would slow a computer down. i also use a program to scan my computer to ad-ware and stuff. (the two programs i use are ccleaner and AD-Aware SE Personal) you can look them up and read what they do to help you get an idea of what im talking about. are programs like these needed for macs? if so where can i get them? and what other programs can i download that will help keep unwanted and unused garbage/junk off of my macbook pro to keep it running nice, fast and smooth?

thanks in advance

 

[eric]

there are scripts that run that do most of this standard maintenance at 3am on any new mac you may buy. you can also get plenty of programs that will clean your system and application caches manually or by way of a schedule.

i use onyx which is free and has some nice features. there's also a program called mainmenu which others seem to like.

you would probably want to clear your internet history/cookies/etc on a regular basis. this is very similar to how you would do it with internet explorer, firefox, opera, etc on a windows system.


by the way, welcome aboard!

 

[indapino22]

thank you for the welcome, would it be ok to run both onyx and mainmenu just to make sure everything is taken care of? or is that just redundent?

 

[Jeff]

You don't need any spyware/virus protection. There are programs that you can use to clean out temp files and so on, but they really don't drag you down as much as they do on a PC. Mac OS pretty much has you taken care of as far as these things are concerned.

Onyx can be a little bit too powerful for people who don't know exactly what everything is. I would not recommend it unless you are pretty knowledgeable about computer specifics. You can do some serious damage that can't easily be undone.

 

[eric]

onyx and mainmenu do the same thing as far as cache cleaning are concerned. one or the other should be fine.

as for Jeff's warning about onyx, as long as you stick to the basics, simple cache cleaning and only play with preferences you are absolutely sure of before you mess with them, you should be fine.
i only use it to clean caches, and i've used it to add a message to my log in window. i also use it to do a bit of snooping around my systems hidden files just to see what's there.

 

[indapino22]

You don't need any spyware/virus protection. There are programs that you can use to clean out temp files and so on, but they really don't drag you down as much as they do on a PC. Mac OS pretty much has you taken care of as far as these things are concerned.

Onyx can be a little bit too powerful for people who don't know exactly what everything is. I would not recommend it unless you are pretty knowledgeable about computer specifics. You can do some serious damage that can't easily be undone.

what kind of things would i need to know to be pretty knowledgeable about computer specifics? IMO i know alot about computers, im not a IT like some people on the forum but i know alot more than the average joe does.

oh and a couple other things, where/how would i check to see how much ram is being used? the macbook pro im going to get is the 15.4" 2.33ghz c2d one, how much ram is being used on a brand new out of the box mbp with no programs opened/running by the user just what is open and running upon start up?

 

[Jeff]

I guess I can give you this- if there is an option to clean something with Oxyn, and you don't know what it is, don't mess with it. Like Eric said, if you just stick to the basics, there won't be any problems. This is probably easier to explain if you have used Onyx or can be looking at it. There are lots of options, but I just stick with the basics.

As far as RAM, there are two things that I see lots of people use. One is a program called Menumeters. It runs in the top menu bar and will display RAM usage, CPU usage and many other things. Another is iStat. It's a dashboard widget that gives you basically the same info as Menumeters, just with cool charts and graphs.

 

[MartinS]

I use Macaroni, which runs scripts when my screensaver's active. Install it, forget about it.