CleanMyMac 1.9

It’s difficult to grasp how much garbage accumulates on your desk in a matter of days. More surprising still is just how filthy your Mac gets even after one or two software installs and a few days of use. CleanMyMac digs down into the depths of your Mac’s hard drive to find extraneous files such as unused language installations, leftover or broken preference files, Universal binaries, and a variety of other files that exist but aren’t necessary on your Mac.

Opening the program displays CleanMyMac’s main screen where you can choose to kick off a complete system scan or choose to scan only for specific types of files. For me, the first scan resulted in over 14GB, about 8GB of which were files in my trash that, at the time of the scan, had not been emptied. Otherwise, it was over 2GB each of language and cache files, with a couple gigs more of other things that were lurking in the dark corners of my Mac.

Once CleanMyMac finds those extra files, it displays detailed information about what those extras are and then you can choose which files you want removed or leave untouched. CleanMyMac also scans every new drive that you mount and lets you know if there is wasted space on those drives, too.

CleanMyMac is slick, easy to use, and likely to be one of the fastest ways to gain extra space on your hard drive.

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[Jeffery Battersby is an IT Consultant, Apple Trainer, (very) smalltime actor, and regular contributor to Macworld. He writes about Macs and more at his blog.]