Keeping your belongings as well as your devices, tidy and in order – in every meaning – makes your life easier and more organized. Your Apple computer is no exception: it’s ready to pay back with an excellent and lightning-fast performance for your attention and a regular cleanup. If you’ve been putting up the tidying of your Mac for a while, now is the right time to get it done.
Look through our ultimate checklist for the perfect cleanup of your Mac top to bottom. Prevent your device from unexpected freezes or slowdowns and give its performance a new boost.
Keep your Mac’s desktop organized
To get started, let’s take a look at something as obvious as the desktop of your device – not all Mac users can proudly say that it’s kept well-organized. All those dozens of files and folders you’ve been stoking on the desktop for months slow down the work of your Mac! It takes Mac more time to start up and perform, with the extra icons on its “front page.”
Your Mac’s desktop is a folder, too. You can access it through the Finder or by typing a command ‘Go – Desktop.’ As it opens, you can see the list of all its files, presented by size or date. Look through all of them, to delete the ones that you no longer need. The bigger files you delete, the more of your Mac’s hard drive space you can free up.
To get this routine done in your place, you can download and run one of the apps created specifically for de-cluttering Mac’s desktop (such as Intego’s Mac Washing Machine).
Clean Internet caches
Web cache uses a certain amount of Mac’s disk space, to store temporary files (such as logging data or media files, from the websites you frequently visit or the apps you open). Initially, the cache is supposed to speed up the performance of your Mac, but with time it gets built up and starts taking more of the hard drive space.
You shouldn’t expect that clearing web cache will help you gain back much disk space. However, if your device is all clogged up, this will surely help. Besides, deleting web cache will help to secure personal data of your system and online accounts from being compromised.
You can clean temporary files/cache folders manually, or use one of the cleaning apps to help you out.
Get rid of old apps and media files
Looking for the new applications and downloading them is one of the most popular activities among the owners of Apple device nowadays. With the latest apps ready to replace their predecessors every day, you definitely have a few apps on your Mac that you no longer need or use. A wise thing to do is, for starters, to delete them to gain some disk space back. Secondly, outdated apps that lost the support of their developers can become a potential threat to your system and data.
Sending an app’s icon to the trash may be not enough to totally uninstall it as its remnants such as temp files and other data can spread throughout whole Mac’s system. External cleaning apps will help you to remove any leftover data and uninstall an app to the core.
Needless to explain that keeping plots of old media files (photos, videos, films, etc.) blots your Mac’s disk space and slows down its performance. Use iCloud or an external disk, to store older media files, and delete any that you no longer need.
Delete e-mail attachments
If your work is based on the daily exchange of large size files through email, with time these e-mail attachments can pile up and take a considerable amount of Mac’s disk space. You shouldn’t be though worried that after being removed from your Mac, these files disappear. You can access them any time directly, through your mail or send the most important ones to iCloud.
Don’t forget to empty the trash
Many Mac users don’t realize that a full trash bin slows down the work of their device, just like all extra files and folders, stores on the desktop. Sending an item into Trash is not enough to get rid of it – you need to empty the trash regularly, not to waste Mac’s hard drive space.
Clear the list of startup items
Each time you launch an app or a folder, just closing its window is not enough to quit it. All opened folders/apps are sent to the list of startup items and can be instantly accessed after each successful login to your user’s account. With time the list can grow so long that it starts slowing down the launch and performance of your device. Thus, fully quitting apps and folders is a must.
First, open the app System Preferences. Go to Users & Groups, open your account and the tab of Login Items. Look through the list and use the ‘-‘ button, to remove any items.
Sweep out Downloads folder
Due to storing temporary files, such as e-mail attachments, software disk images, and installation files, PDF files and others, Downloads folder can be clogged easily. Cleaning it won’t take much time: open the folder, view the list of the items in it, sort them out by date, and delete the oldest ones. Also, you can get rid of anything ending with ‘.dmg’ as most surely you won’t need these files again.
Delete duplicated files
Duplicated files can be annoying for several reasons: they may confuse a user, as sometimes it’s hard to tell which file is the original, and which is its copy. Duplicates stored in several folders waste more disk space. Besides, they slow down regular backups of Mac.
Finding and deleting all of the duplicates is a time-consuming task. Once again, one of the cleaning apps will save you the mess.
Cleaning your device, literally
You can perform a physical cleanup of your device as a final stroke. Carefully sweep out dust off your Mac’s keyboard and attached devices, use approved alcohol-based wipers and take a special care of the screen.
Now your Mac computer is all clean, shining and ready for productive work.