There are hundreds of cleaning tools available for Mac but MacKeeper is one of the best I’ve ever tried. Effective, super-slick and ultra easy to use, MacKeeper is a new cleaning and maintenance tool that’s saved me over 20GB of hard drive space that was being wasted by various files. It differs from some cleaners in that as well as offline cleaning, it also offers online help courtesy of a subscription only Geek on Demand service. MacKeeper’s interface is clear and simple with all of the available features listed down the left hand side and details of each in the middle of the screen. I like the way that each time you open it, you have an instant overview of when your last maintenance task was, total disk space saved by MacKeeper etc:
You know a cleaning tool is good when it saves you over 20GB of hard drive space. That’s exactly what MacKeeper did for me. To see if it can do the same for you, go to One-Click Scan and MacKeeper will begin to scan your system for files that are duplicated, cached and taking up space in other ways. The scan can take a while and you’ll notice a small clock-face next to each feature showing you how much time is left before the task is complete. The time it takes to scan is one of the few drawbacks of MacKeeper but at least you know it’s doing a proper job.
I was amazed by how much junk MacKeeper found particularly in the Binaries Cutter (almost 1GB) Logs Cleaner and Cache Cleaner (over 2GB). It also revealed almost 1GB of language files I’ll probably never need. The Duplicates Finder was particularly outstanding. I had almost 15GB of duplicated files and MacKeeper allows you to drill down to see where they are. However, be very careful with this as it can remove iMovie files that have been duplicated by iMovie from the raw footage to add to your projects folder. Removing them could mean that you end up with footage missing from your projects.
The Old Files feature was not so impressive either, as it seemed to take metadata from the files to assess the age rather than the actual time they had been left unused on the system. There are other tools such as a Shredder, Data Encrypter and Undelete tool as well as online help with Geek on Demand plus some kind of online registration that tracks your Mac if stolen.
MacKeeper is an amazingly effective, slick and comprehensive tool. You’re bound to speed-up and trim your system by using it.
