How best to speed up my Mac

[JamesEis]

I periodically get adverts like the following:

"As your Mac gets older, it begins to slow down, making simple tasks difficult. The four main reasons for this are:
Your Mac is starting to get low on
disk space.
One of your apps is damaged and
running incorrectly.
Caches are cluttering up your Mac
during startup.
Unnecessary apps are consuming
too much RAM.
Luckily, no matter how old or slow your Mac is, you can easily fix it by using CleanMyMac 2. It's a safe,
all-in-one Mac cleaner that removes apps, data, and gigabytes of unnecessary junk to help speed up your slow Mac.
A Clean Mac is a Fast Mac
All junk files, little and big, add up to slow down your Mac. CleanMyMac 2 removes only the files that are safe to delete."

etc, etc. In this case the product being advertised is CleanMyMac 2. My Mac is indeed very slow these days, and the advert rings very true. It seems to be just what I need. But every time I ask someone whether I should invest in something like this, I'm told emphatically 'no'. Yet nobody has managed to make me understand why not. Can anyone explain, preferably in words of one syllable, please?

 

[MacInWin]

Avoid CleanMyMac at any price, any time. It's crapware. It does nothing that you cannot do for yourself with built in utilities, or find an app to do that for free. And depending on where you get it, you may get a load of adware to go along with it. Rubbish.

The only product you might consider to speed up your Mac is Onyx - Link. Get the proper version from that site for your version of OS X. It's free. Just leave the defaults and run the cleaning routines. It will empty caches, clean out logs and generally tidy up things nicely. You only need to run it about twice a year, if that. I run mine once a year.

But the number one speedup is to make sure you have plenty of disk space free on your boot drive, perhaps as much as 20%, depending on the size of the HD. You didn't say what version OS X or what Mac you have, so we can't make specific recommendations on how much to leave free.

Other than Onyx, you might look at Adblock+ and Ghostery to block some recently-appearing adware that can hijack your browser if you aren't careful. AdwareMedic will clean it out, but the other two should block it in the first place.

OS X is a pretty safe place to be, and maintenance is much easier than in the Windows world.

 

[ralphmorgan]

My system won't let me open Onyx saying it is from an unidentified developer. Not being very computer literate I am at a stop. Is Onyx available thru Apple somewhere? running version 10.10.3 Thanks

 

[Raz0rEdge]

While OnyX ins't from a App Store developer, as long as you downloaded the app from the proper website you are safe. Go into System Preferences->Security & Privacy and click Open Anyway on the bottom for OnyX..

 

[MacInWin]

Or, to avoid a system level change, just right-click (ctrl-click) on Onyx, click Open and in the resulting dialog box you can select to run it. That will tell the system that Onyx is ok to run from now on without making any system changes.