Freeware Mac, clean up your Mac’s act with Onyx

Mac OSX Leopard and previous versions are pretty good about cleaning up after themselves but occasionally may take longer to start up or shut down or a bit of both.  I recently experienced this on a two week old MacBook Pro running Leopard.

Aside from installing a few programs, I hadn’t done much with it.  OSX keeps track of several things you do.  There are boot caches, preference caches and several other things that can occasionally slow the system down.

There are also log files, that are for the most part unnecessary so you can safely get rid of them.  Onyx is a free cleaning utility that will clear out several areas of the system for you and should, in most cases, do away with the "sluggishness."

The most popular section of the program is probably the "Automation" area which will do most of the common tasks automatically but the other sections offer more in-depth options but don’t have to be performed as often.

Onyx has plenty to offer and should be investigated so you can strike a balance between keeping your Mac optimized for the way you use it.  The only problem with Onyx is that every time it starts it will want to check the hard drive’s SMART status and will offer to repair permissions.  You may want to run this the first time Onyx starts but can be safely ignored most times after but if you start having difficulties, those utilities are always there, ready to prevent disaster.

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• System maintenance is a breeze with OnyX 1.9.6b2; Free Mac application
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