Im looking to reduce the amount of time we’re currently spending drumming our fingers whilst the spinny beachball, spins. Looking at the App store and reading reviews, there’s a plethora of ‘the best mac clean up apps’ around and I would very much appreciate the hive’s views, opinions and experiences to recommend me one that is easy for a non-tech to use and will speed up the machine.

Admittedly, its a 6 year old iMac, 2.7Ghz i5 running the latest Mojave OS and is used at home for internet, mail, music and photo storage and usual domestic duties with Pages and according to the About this Mac doo-dah, it has 8Mb RAM a 1Tb hard disk with 765Gb free space, so in theory, its having a relatively easy life.

But its becoming increasingly slower to respond to inputs and requests and I’m thinking that a spring clean would do it a world of good, especially as buying a new or refurbed one is not an option at the moment.

TIA

Onyx is free and does a good job but the UI is more suited to techie types.

Clean My Mac is £25pa and much slicker to look at.

BTW have you checked out the native tool for cleaning up crap? https://youtu.be/hp3SlXohKq0

Thanks for your suggestions @spacemonkey and I’ll check the youtube link.

Is the Hard drive a solid state one? If not I’d look to get one of those.

My MaC is about the same age as yours ,
I’ve just gone through the same process.
Spent money on a cleaner, tried all the built in stuff etc
Nothing made any difference, got so frustrated with it in the end I decided to take the nuclear option, set back to factory setting wiped out my full months data allowance in the process and guess what it’s no better.
I’m guessing it’s hardware related now
but I’m reluctant to throw more money at it.

My iMac is ten years old and still runs OK. Does take longer to cold start but I’m running four versions on from the original OS

If you run Activity Monitor what does it show? If I leave Chrome running it slowly consumes memory so I occasionally have to shut it down, let the memory be reclaimed and restart it.

How many apps do you have in the tray at the top of the screen? They all use up memory

Hey thanks all for your comments and suggestions.

It’s a sata hard drive, 1Tb, with plenty of free space. The activity monitor wasn’t showing anything in particular that was using lots of memory or processing power, so I figured it is probably bad housekeeping and lots of clutter gumming it up.

I trawled the internet yesterday evening and this morning and followed a number of clean up operations, mainly to do with clearing system and browser caches and clearing some deadwood out such as apps in start up and some other bits which I can’t remember now. I think it was Macworld that had a list of 10 things to do to get a Mac to run quicker, which was written and explained in the best way for me to understand and follow. This has definitely improved things, it’s quicker to load apps, switch between users and using apps, especially the browser. No spinning beach ball of death either!

Then the cricket started, so I’ve done bugger all since, however I reckon I can improve it more if I remove 88Gb of music to an external drive and trust in the fluffy clouds. I could also sift through email attachments, or at least, organise my files better so I save attachments rather than leave them in the mail app.

So I have yet to use a cleaner type tool/app and there’s other stuff on the list to look at.

You can very easily upgrade the RAM as it has 4 slots. When I installed Mojave our iMac slowed considerably. I installed 2x16gb memeory in the spare slots and it has been much quicker and more reliable.

I reckon I can improve it more if I remove 88Gb of music to an external drive and trust in the fluffy clouds.

I know very little about Macs, but I would be absolutely astounded if that made a fig of difference.

Can’t you just back up your data and then do whatever the fruity equivalent of a factory reset is rather than spend hours of your life fannying about with it?

So I have yet to use a cleaner type tool/app and there’s other stuff on the list to look at.

Again I don’t know about Macs but in the Windows world “cleaner” apps are somewhere between near-useless and dangerous.

What’s a 500GB SSD cost these days, about fifty quid? And what @nitster said.

it has 8Mb RAM

I think I see your problem. A modern OS needs about a thousand times that. (-:

6 year old iMac, 2.7Ghz i5

Sounds a very similar spec to mine, the only difference being I dropped for the fusion drive (so it’s a ‘semi-ssd’).

if it’s a 21.5″ like mine then upgrading the RAM is somewhat involved but i suspect that (or swapping to an SSD) are the only things that are going to make a difference. Our 2011 macbook with SSD upgrade still runs well and the iMac is pretty good 95% of the time. It will suffer if it has two people logged in (the background account eats memory as well as the foreground). Apps are ever more memory hungry it seems.

My goto in those circumstances is;

1. Disable your antivirus and see if that makes a difference, they’re often culprits.
2. Rebuild the spotlight index
3. Zap the PRAM/NVRAM

google will help you on the last 2, odds are its the spotlight/finder index.

Ahhh… top tips and thanks @scrumfled, will do some googling.

From the reading I’ve done so far, it seems that the Mac OS works better with lots of available memory and space on the hard drive, so freeing up as much as I can by shifting my music elsewhere kinda makes sense.

Installing more ram on my ‘late 2012’ model is apparently not an option, however that does depend on where that information comes from. Even the Apple site contradicts itself. That YouTube ‘how to’ @simons-nicolaiuk leaves me not wanting to undertake that myself, so good to see it is an option. Boosting the ram is definitely my preferred option if I can, although I understand that the widgets are quite expensive. The hard drive is an ssd sata jobby. Interesting point too about users logged in concurrently, we’re always doing that, so will stop that behaviour.

Another interesting point gleaned from somewhere was to shut down the machine at the end of each day, allowing it to dispose of cached stuff IIRC, again, I’ve been putting it into sleep mode each night, so it’ll be interesting to see how much affect that has.

I back up daily via the jolly useful and user friendly Time Machine and I’ll go with the format c approach as a last resort. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s already noticeably quicker just by doing a bit of basic housekeeping. 😁

Turned off FileVault and spent a bit of time cleaning up.
Saved 50gig.

Yep, cheers @brant, more by luck than judgement, FileVault wasn’t enabled, it’s certainly one of the first in the lists of tips I’ve read through as it seems to be a locally stored back up, thereby duplicating everything.

25gig of iOS files was another eye opener.

possible temporary solution.

Stop using chrome – for me the issues of memory appear to be the ‘Google chrome helper’.

close chrome, reboot & choose the option to NOT restart apps on restart, use safari instead.

So far so good – bye bye chrome.

I’m thinking that a spring clean would do it a world of good

Have you done any physical cleaning? Make sure the fans and air ducts are clear, and maybe check that the thermal paste on any chip heatsinks is still giving a good contact. Modern CPUs and GPUs will throttle back if they start to get hot, and a lot of them do so quite aggressively.