Image: Sarah Tew/CNET
After three years of hard work and very little in the way of system maintenance, my MacBook Pro was starting to feel tired. But all it took to bring a spring back into its step was 20 minutes and MacPaw’s CleanMyMac 3.
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I’m normally wary of “system cleanup utilities” because, to be perfectly frank, they don’t do that much and can cause more damage than good. But for a long time I’d been hearing good things about CleanMyMac 3, so after taking a backup of my system — just in case — I decided to see what it could do for me.
And I have to say that I’m impressed.
Before I go on, let me just explain the state that my MacBook Pro was in. Basically this system has had pretty much daily use for the past three years and almost nothing in the way of maintenance. I open the lid in the morning, and close it in the evening, and repeat the process the next day. The thing barely gets rebooted (prior to this test my Mac had been running for 24 days straight).
So it’s fair to say that it has had a hard life. On top of that, it has a lot of software installed, some new and current, some old junk that was transferred over when I first set this Mac up.
I wouldn’t say that my Mac was creaking under the weight of all this neglect, but it had certainly lost some of its sparkle, and was due for a bit of a spring cleaning.
And that’s what it got!
MacPaw claims that CleanMyMac 3 “removes gigabytes of junk in just two clicks,” so I put this to the test.
And sure enough, after installation, after two clicks it had freed up almost ten gigabytes of assorted detritus off of my SSD.
Nice.
Next I used the uninstaller to remove some unwanted applications. Since I wasn’t even sure what some of the applications were, I did this in several hits. The first pass removed nine applications, and I went on afterward to remove another fifteen applications.
By this point I’d freed up about twenty gigabytes of space on my SSD, getting rid of almost two dozen applications with only a few clicks. This was much quicker and easier than manually uninstalling applications.
I then decided that my Mac deserved a little maintenance, so let CleanMyMac 3 run a series of jobs on my system ranging from cleanup scripts to a full verification of my system disk. Yes, I know I could have done most if not all of this myself, but not that quickly I couldn’t (and not without a lot of time on Google).
I walked away from my Mac to get a cup of coffee, and by the time I came back everything was done.
I then rebooted my Mac and I have to admit that it does feel snappier, especially apps such as Safari and Mail. Boot up is also a couple of seconds faster, and there’s less lag for the first minute or so on getting to the macOS desktop.
Does my Mac feel like “new”? Of course not, that would be unrealistic to expect, but I do have more free space, and I am enjoying the benefits of having a speedier, snappier system, all for a few clicks.
A single CleanMyMac 3 license is $39.95, and there are discounts for volume purchases.
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