Mac OS X 10.7 is the recent major release of Mac OS X, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers.
Sep 25, 2015 For getting the best outcome from mac os and to speed up the performance of the whole computer, there you need a system cleaner. You need such a system cleaner by which the overall system will run smooth and your computer speed and performance will be as fast as it.
Mac OS X 10.7 was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. On August 28, 2009, it was released worldwide and was made available for purchase from Apple's website and its retail stores at the price of US$29 for a single-user license. As a result of the low price, initial sales of Mac OS X 10.7 were significantly higher than that of its predecessors. The release of Mac OS X 10.7 came nearly two years after the introduction of Mac OS X 10.6, the second longest time span between successive Mac OS X releases.
Unlike previous versions of Mac OS X, the goals with Mac OS X 10.7 were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint. An addition of new end-user features was not a primary goal. Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to fully take advantage of modern Macintosh hardware. New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications. This is also the first Mac OS release since System 7.1.1 that does not support the PowerPC architecture, as Apple now intends to focus on its current line of Intel-based products.
Mac OS X 10.7 was succeeded by Mac OS X Lion (version 10.7) on July 20, 2011. The earlier version continues to be sold for the benefit of users that require Mac OS X 10.7 in order to upgrade to Lion, which is primarily sold through the Mac App Store introduced in the 10.7 update.
Mac OS X Mac OS X 10.7 was the last release of Mac OS X to support the 32-bit Intel Core Solo and Intel Core Duo CPUs.
Like PC, Mac also needs regular cleanup. The purpose is to make our Mac work smoothly and efficiently. Windows users have it very easy because they have Ccleaner. For those who are very familiar of Ccleaner, it's a free utility software that clears all unnecessary junk files to free up hard disk space, especially cache files or temporary internet files. These types of files literally take over your disk space so they need to be disposed of, and that is what Ccleaner is for. Luckily, Mac users can use Mac cleaner - EaseUS CleanGenius to clean your Mac junk files and free up disk space to boost Mac's speed and improve its system performance.
EaseUS CleanGenius as Mac cleaner
EaseUS CleanGenius is highly recommended from the start because it is free. It works well with Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).
When caches, logs, system junks accumulate, they will slow down your Mac and waste the precious disk space. EaseUS CleanGenius offers a quick and easy way to clean the system caches, system logs, user caches, user logs, user downloads, Trash, Safari Internet cache and more just by one click.
Over the course of time, you may have cluttered your Mac OS X hard drive with various software installations. When you drag an application to the Trash, its preferences, cache and log files still remain on your drive and waste valuable disk space. With EaseUS CleanGenius, you can easily uninstall the applications completely you want to remove and delete its related components & files (preferences, cache files and log files).
EaseUS CleanGenius also monitors your hard disk space and warn you when the disk space is running low, and then you can clean your Mac and free up more disk space to let your Mac work smoothly.
'CleanGenius is a drive monitoring and cleanup tool for OS X 10.7 or later. Not only does it give you a quick overview of your drives' free space from the menu bar, but it also provides a 'fast clean' option for clearing out certain parts of your hard drive.' More reviews...
How to clean my Mac? It’s a question most Mac users ask eventually. All computers eventually get clogged up with user files, traces left by different applications and sometimes even Malware. There are also a number of other reasons that can cause the Mac OS to become slow or unresponsive. Here are my tips based on how I optimize, clean up and speed up my Mac.
Are you facing any of these symptoms:
- Frequent spinning wheel or “beach ball”?
- Mac running slow?
- Mac booting up slow?
- Mac overheating?
It’s probably a time to run some clean up in your Mac.
Remember, whenever doing system maintenance and clean up on your Mac, there is a chance that something could go wrong! Pleas stay safe and always have up to date backups.
Disclosure: This article contains links to companies and products I’m affiliated with. I only ever promote products that I actually use and find helpful.
How to Clean Mac Os the Quick Way
Before we get to the tips on how to do things manually, I’ll share with you the best way to clean a Mac. See, I am using an excellent tool to automatically clean up my Mac. This tool is called Clean My Mac and I find it to be the best clean up app for Mac. Basically, it scans your Mac for all sorts of crap and gets rid of it, once and for all. It saves me bucketloads of time and headaches.
Clean My Mac is made by a company called Macpaw. They have a long experience of coding software for the Mac. In my experience it is the best software for Mac maintenance and cleaning.
Here is a list of some of the things Clean My Mac will take care for you:
- Optimize, repair and speed up Mac OS
- Clean up system junk
- Rebuild Launch Services
- Reindex Spotlight
- Repair Disk Permissions
- Verify and Repair external USB hard drives
- Reindex Mail
- Identify and quit hung applications
- Manage Mac application data
- Show unused apps
- Uninstall apps properly (leaving no trace files)
- Clean up leftovers from old deleted apps
- Update existing applications
- Slim down application size (remove unneeded translation files without affecting app functionality)
- Manage Mac extensions
- Clean Mac cache and RAM
- Clearing cache on Mac
- Free up RAM
- Flush DNS cache on your Mac
- Protect the private info on your Mac
- Delete your browsing history
- Delete your chat history (Skype and Messages)
- Clear saved passwords activities
- Improve Mac security and safety
- Remove malware from your Mac
- Remove adware from your Mac
- Eraser (for secure removal of data)
- Clear up disk space on Mac
- Identify and remove large and old files
- Time Machine Snapshot Thinning
- iPhoto Cleanup (for removing unnecessary photo versions, includes a preview function)
- iTunes Cleanup (for removing iTunes junk files)
- Trash Cleanup (knows how to remove locked files too)
- Clean up Mail attachments
So those are some of the features. But what does using Clean My Mac actually do for me?
- I value my time. I think time really is our most valuable asset and I don’t want to waste any of it on trivial things. Using a tool like this to run cleanup on my Mac instead of doing everything manually saves me tons of time to spend on things that are more precious to me.
- I want to make sure my Mac is clean and optimized in every possible way. With this tool I can get my Mac cleaner than I ever could manually.
- MacPaw are great with keeping their software up to date with all the latest Mac OS updates.
- There are constantly new features being added to Clean My Mac with updates.
- Security is important to me and a clean, well functioning computer is a part of it. Also, Clean My Mac is completely safe to use. MacPaw is a safe and responsible company. I’ve never had any issues. That is not an excuse to not have backups though. Always have backups.
- Running it regularly keeps my Mac cleaner than would ever be possible if I was doing it manually.
What about other tools for Mac cleanup? Well, I’ve tried a number of different Mac cleaning tools in the past, including free Mac cleaning tools and paid ones. But I’ve used this one for many years now (first Clean My Mac 2, then Clean My Mac 3 and now Clean My Mac X) simply because I found it to be the best cleaner for Mac.
Whether it’s about running Mac hard drive cleanup or speeding up the computer in other ways, to me there is just no contest. MacPaw is completely on point.
Clean My Mac is a paid app, but they have a free version which has limited functionality but is still very useful. Clean My Mac is also included in Setapp – a curated bundle of 160+ lovely Mac apps that I also use and recommend.
So, I find that’s the best way to clean up my Mac. However, if you want to do what you can manually to run clean up on Mac and speed up your computer… There are still many things you can do that way.
Maintain the Mac OS File System via First Aid in Disk Utility
File system issues are pretty common. These include things like corrupt directory structures and files left in unknown state because of crashes, forced restarts or forced application quits.
Disc Utility is a tool that comes with your Mac. You will find it in the Applications/Utilities folder. Disc Utility has many uses, one being to monitor and keep up the health of your file system. Some of the old features like erase free space got dropped by Apple some time back. But it now has a useful feature called First Aid.
Running First Aid in Disk Utility will not free up or clean up hard drive space on your Mac. But if your Mac is slow, there is a chance it will make your Mac work better and faster with less errors.
Inside Disk Utility, you will find the option to run “First Aid”. Do this for all of your hard drives. First Aid will run a series of checks to make sure everything is in order.
First Aid identifies and fixes these issues. For your startup disk, you have to manually click “Verify Disk” and “Repair Disk” to sort it out. Don’t worry – it’s a routine maintenance task and completely safe.
Obide The 15% Rule
For good performance, it is recommended to keep at least 15% of free space on your system hard drive at all times.
(If you look carefully at the picture in the previous chapter of this post, you can see that I failed).
According to this test by Macworld, the more free space on your drive, the faster it performs. With the 7200 RPM 1 TB hard drive they tested, the difference in speed was up to 35% (depending on the task) when comparing a 5% full drive to a 97% full drive.
Lesson: Don’t leave clutter or archive material sitting on your work or system disk.
Where does the 15% number come from though? It’s said to be the minimum requirement for your system processes to run properly.
Mac OS needs free hard drive space for it’s built in defragmentation process and a swap space for managing memory use, among other things.
Individual applications also use the free disk space temporarily. Audio, graphics and video applications can be especially demanding in this respect with temp file sizes reaching several gigabytes sometimes.
If your hard drive becomes too full, it causes your computer to slow down and freeze up. Mac OS becomes unable to run it’s automatic system maintenance processes properly.
Always having a good amount of free space on your drive also provides good buffer space for when you have to download or handle very large files temporarily.
Are you, like me, finding it hard to keep 15% free? You should, like me, probably think about archiving some of your data. If it’s not being used, it doesn’t belong to your main HD.
Doing a proper cleanup with help of some good software (more on this later) can also help.
Clean Startup Items
Startup items are applications that launch automatically when your Mac boots up. A lot of software you install tend to sneak their own processes into your startup items. Often times these processes can be absolutely unnecessary.
These unnecessary startup items are eating up your computer’s resources. You should periodically check and clean up your startup items list.
You will find startup items at:
System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Login Items.
System Preferences -> Users & Groups -> Login Items.
Note that in order to remove startup items, you need to click the little minus button below the list. The little check boxes are for hiding startup items (they will still run).
Be careful not to remove stuff you might actually need. If you’re not sure of what something is, I advice you to leave it be and go do some research (Google is your friend there).
Delete Unused Apps from Your Mac
Apps and games take up a lot of space. Once we stop using them we easily forget about them. Yet they stay on our hard drive hogging up space.
It is also common to have various “helper” apps running on the background without you knowing. These take up CPU and RAM from your computer.
Delete unused apps from your Mac or Macbook.
How to delete Mac apps using Mac uninstaller software?
On a Mac, you can delete apps manually from your application folder. You simply drag & drop them into trash. However! Many apps have additional support files and folders located elsewhere on the computer.
This is why I recommend using a dedicated uninstaller software for Mac. It will delete the apps on your Mac properly, leaving no traces of them on the hard drive and no helper apps running on the background.
How to delete Mac apps manually?
Go into your app folder. You will find it at the path “Macintosh HD/Applications”. You can also choose the menu item “Go -> Applications” in Finder.
Look for apps and games you’re not using anymore. If you’re not sure what something is or whether you need it or not, my advice is to leave it. It may be a support application for something else you’re using. If you are suspecting it may be malware, you need to run a Mac malware removal tool.
If you’re 100% sure you don’t need it though, just drag it into Trash icon in your Dock. Remember to empty the Trash to get rid of it for good. Done!
Deal with Duplicates and Similars
If you’re thinking about how to clean up Mac hard drive space, you should consider the issue of duplicate and similar files. These may be taking tons of hard drive space without you ever realizing it! I certainly always keep ending up with lots of duplicate files on my hard drive.
Duplicate audio and video files are especially nasty because they take up a lot of space. With photos the problem is typically that there are often a lot of similar ones, when you only just want to keep one.
There is a fantastic app called Gemini to help with this problem. It’s also made by MacPaw – the same company who make the best Mac cleaning app Clean My Mac. Gemini is a godsend for me.
Gemini uses an intelligent process to identify files that are potential duplicates or similars. Yes – it can even look through your photos and identify ones that are not identical but almost the same.
It then allows you to review everything in a super nice and sleek interface (they even won a design award for it). You can choose what to get rid of and what to keep. This little app has cleared up so much hard drive space on my Mac.
Gemini lets you preview files straight from the user interface. It shows exactly where the different files are located and lets you jump to look at them in Finder which is very helpful.
My duplicate problem gets especially bad with iTunes. Over time the iTunes library becomes riddled with differently named versions of the same tracks. What is cool with Gemini 2 is once I have my list of potential duplicates, I can use the preview function and listen to the files straight from Gemini 2. When it comes the time to remove duplicates, Gemini 2 actually launches iTunes to do it properly (without me having to do a thing). Very cool.
Clearing Cache on Mac
Cache files are temporary data files stored on your computer. Your computer uses these to reach for data quickly instead of having to always retrieve it from the original source. This of course is all in good purpose. Over time though, the amount of data stored in your cache folders adds up. This can start to slow down your computer. At the very least, it is taking up a lot of hard drive space.
What are cache files? There are several kinds of cache files stored on your computer:
- Web browser cache
- System cache
- User cache (this includes app and DNS cache)
If you’re wondering about how to clean up the cache on your Mac, the easiest way is to use a dedicated app. Doing it manually is tedious work because there are hundreds of different cache folders stored on your Mac. Furthermore, a mistake can happen and you may end up deleting something you shouldn’t have.
Time is precious and it’s not worth risking mistakes. For these reasons I recommend using a dedicated app for clearing cache on Mac. The best app to clean Mac cache is Clean My Mac. It has a feature called System Junk Scan. It will scan all the cache locations and safely clean up the cache files on your Mac.
Do you want to proceed manually and clean the cache on your Mac in any case? No problem!
This article will go through in detail how to clean up cache on your Mac manually:
- How to empty user cache on Mac
- How to delete system and app cache on Mac
- How to clear browser cache on Mac with detailed instructions on
- How to clear cache in Chrome
- How to clear cache in Firefox
- How to clear cache in Safari
Read here: How to Clear Cache on a Mac
Clean the Mac Desktop
It’s pretty stupid, but having your desktop cluttered with files actually slows your Mac down. This is because each icon takes up some RAM.
The solution is easy: Clean it up and don’t use the desktop for storing files. Use a different folder. I have created a folder called “Inbox” where most of the temporary file traffic takes place.
Install Software Updates
It’s good to keep your software up to date. I am always quick to install security updates. However, I have grown wary when it comes to upgrading the entire operating system. It’s always a risk if you are relying on your computer to get important work done. When new operating systems are released, it’s quite normal to have all kinds of compatibility issues with 3rd party software and hardware.
Often times these issues are addressed shortly after big updates. But here’s the thing: even a week can be a very long time to wait for an update if you need to get some work done. Also, if you’re using any older hardware/software that isn’t being supported anymore by the devs, you could be screwed. I have had enough first hand experience of these problems in the past. I prefer not to risk it anymore.
So when I have a setup that works well, I try to stick to it for as long as I can. It is important however to make sure that whatever your operating system is, it’s always up to date when it comes to security and performance updates. The same obviously goes for the other software on your computer.
Back Up Your Mac
Make sure you have a proper backup strategy in place. Here are my recommendations:
- Automate your backups.
- Don’t rely on a single backup.
- Don’t rely on a single location for your backups.
- Make sure you have access to proper file history (Apple’s Time Machine is great for this).
- Have the ability to restore your operating system quickly.
- Have proper archives (archives and backups are different)
- Verify that your backups are actually working.
My favorite software for backing up:
Backblaze – affordable cloud backups.
Carbon Copy Cloner – maintains a bootable clone of my drive.
Backblaze – affordable cloud backups.
Carbon Copy Cloner – maintains a bootable clone of my drive.
For more detailed information on backing up, here is an article I’ve written about my approach: My Easy Automated Backup Strategy
Using the Computer
Other than the basic Mac OS maintenance, you should also pay attention to how you actually use the computer in order to keep it running optimally. Here are a few tips:
- Reboot regularly.
- Properly quit applications you’re not using (don’t just close the windows).
- Close unnecessary browser tabs (these take up RAM, too).
- Turn off Bluetooth if you’re not using it.
- Use Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities) to find out about your CPU and RAM hogs.
- Bypass or remove unused audio plugins in your music projects and hard drive. They are applications, too.
- Turn on firewall to help prevent intruders (System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Firewall)
- Make sure cooling works properly and the fans are getting a good airflow (small laptop fans are also prone to get clogged up with dust and debris over time).
Stay clean!