OnyX - OS X System Maintenance Utility

If your looking for a way of cleaning up your Mac then this free piece of software should be right up your street.

OnyX is quite a powerful tool so if your not sure on something then read the help file found in the help menu before you do anything.

The main reason I have used OnyX in the past is to make use of the Cleaning facility that it has to offer which is the section I am going to focus on as part of this review.

WARNING: Ensure that you don't have any programs open when you run OnyX.  If you do have some programs running it will close them so you may lose your work if you've not saved any open files.

 

Click Continue and the S.M.A.R.T. status box will appear

Click Continue to verify your startup volume

 

If everything checks out OK you'll get the following message:

 Click on OK to continue

Enter an administrators username and password and click OK

As I mentioned earlier, in this particular blog entry I'm going to show you the Cleaning facility that OnyX has to offer, so from the menu options shown above, click on Cleaning.

You now have six different sections that you can clean to choose from:  System, User, Internet, Fonts, Logs and Misc.

Each section has an Execute button that will then clean up the appropriate items.

If you're not sure what all the options are then either leave the default settings and click on Execute or Click on the Help menu and take a look there for information about the options you are unsure of.

After clicking on the Execute button you will get the following Warning message:

Click on Continue and the cleaning that you have selected will begin.

When the process has completed, click on OK to continue:

 

You will then be prompted to restart your computer:

 

If you've done all the cleaning you want, then click on Restart.  If you want to click on another section and perform some more cleaning, click on Close and you will be returned to the OnyX program.

That's it!  You've now seen how to use the OnyX to clean your Mac. All you need to do now is download and install it from the following official website:

 http://www.titanium.free.fr/download.php

One thing to remember is that normally cleaning out the caches and temp files found on your computer is normally associated with speeding things up a bit.  Depending on what cache/temp files you clean up, you may actually experience the exact opposite and your Mac may run slightly slower for a while.  For example if you've cleaned out the Spotlight cache it will be empty so your system will be rebuilding it.  Once rebuilt, you will be back up to speed!