In my opinion, the best first step to speeding up your Mac is to repair your permissions and run disk repair as outlined in my article Speed Up Your Mac Article HERE.
The next step is to clean your caches, rebuild your indexes, and run your macs daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts. This can all be done easily with the FREE and very powerful ONYX.
FREE Download Onyx from Titanium’s Software.
Once you have ONYX downloaded and installed, its a good idea to make sure that you have backed up ALL of your stuff. Like using any cleaning program, things can get moved or lost, so make sure you don’t get caught!
When you are satisfied your files are safe, go ahead and open ONYX. The first thing you will see is a alert box that asks if you want ONYX to check the S.M.A.R.T status of your hard drive. S.M.A.R.T stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology. Most hard drives these days monitor their own performance and try to anticipate if a failure is imminent, and if their is something wrong with your drive, you will be notified after this test. It is well worth doing.
Once this has completed, the next alert will ask if you want to verify your drive. If you have already performed this task because you are following on from my first “Speed Up Your Mac” article this is not necessary. If you haven’t already done this, it is well worth doing as it will find any drive errors. This process can take some time, and it will require all other programs to be closed, so if you decide to run it, go get yourself a coffee and some fresh air after you begin.
When Verification has finished, ONYX will ask you to type in your password to give it permission to make changes and clean thing up.
You will now see the main menu bar for ONYX.
As you can see, this program has a lot of in depth features and can do a lot of different things, but for this tutorial, we will focus on cleaning up quickly and easily. To start cleaning, press the “Automation” button. You will now see the Automation screen.
The safest way to proceed is to accept the defaults and press “Execute”. If you are following on from my first “Speed Up Your Mac” article you might want to un-check “Repair Permissions” as you will have already done this. Other wise, leave it checked. If you are like me and like living on the edge, you can go ahead and check/un-check the items you feel necessary.
*BE WARNED* – As with every clean up program, there can be unwanted side effects, so proceed with caution!
For me personally, I do change it up as I like to clean my system deeply, and I am happy to put things back how I like them after the cleaning (such as re-arranging my icons how I like them on my desk top again). I also like to execute my Macs built in daily, weekly, and monthly maintenance scripts. Below is how I use ONYX.
*NOTE* – I take no responsibility if you copy my settings and loose something.
When you are happy with your cleaning options, its time to press execute.
ONYX will tell you it is going to close any other programs that are open, so again, make sure you have saved your work.
ONYX will now start performing maintenance. In most cases this will take some time, so if you didn’t stretch your legs, get a coffee and some fresh air before, now is the time. When ONYX has finished, a dialogue box will appear. Click OK.
ONYX will now want to restart you computer.
Restart your computer and you are all done!