CleanMyMac

[french frank]

Am I right that the CMM Reset Application option just returns it to the Default settings? Anyone have experience of this speeding up an application?

[Dave2002]

I don't know. I thought that most Mac "cleaners" have been mentioned as presenting problems, though I did find a positive review for CCleaner (Mac version). Do you really need to use CMM?

[french frank]

Do you really need to use CMM?

It's interesting to see what it proposes cleaning by way of junk, most of which I did delete. Wasn't so sure about the large files which hadn't been opened for over a year. CMM's tip is that if you have an application that has got a bit slow, you can use the Reset Application option rather than trying to reinstall it.

CMM was the one recommended by the guy who came to see me through the change to the new machine. They usually keep abreast of such things as which applications are currently 'the best' and which can change from year to year (antivirus was Kaspersky, now ESET, apparently ) and they then recommend them to customers.

As I'm fairly relaxed about losing data anyway, I'll probably try resetting my Word program :-)

[Dave2002]

How much spare disc drive or SSD storage do you have? If this relates to your new machine my guess is that it'll have at leat 100 Gbytes spare. Tidying things up is arguably not a bad thing to do, but from a technical point of view my guess is that if won't make much difference as long as there's substantial spare space on your Mac OS X system. Windows systems have always been much more problematic to keep in order in my experience, and use of several tools to keep the systems trimmed has mostly been "mandatory".

If you get less than 25 Gbytes of spare space then it can be worth pruning/trimming a Mac OS X system. If the spare space approaches zero, performance does start to "drop off a cliff".

[french frank]

Thanks, Dave2002

The machine is overall much faster - it was just the programs associated with Office that seemed slow. On the old machine I always thought it was guerrilla action on MicroSoft software …

[Anastasius]

Thanks, Dave2002

.... it was just the programs associated with Office that seemed slow. ...

That's just normal "performance" for Microsoft bloatware.

I do have CMM and it's annoying that it's behaviour is like a tut-tutting Aunt as if a program while running is a little tardy for good reasons then CMM will pop up a box saying 'This program is being unresponsive, do you want to quit'.

"Um, no, actually. I'll decide if I want to Force Quit. And while we're on the subject CMM who told you to sit there monitoring my Mac and wasting my CPU cycles ?"

Thanks, FF, for reminding me to uninstall the damn thing.