MacCleanse — Ajax for Your System
If you are like me, you like your system to be lean and mean. Empty the Trash right after throwing something in. Keeping folders in order, cleaning out unnecessary baggage when you get the chance. Well, I do that all the time. Deleting applications with AppZapper, slimming my software with xSlimmer. You could say, that I have a very clean system. Still, when I tried out MacCleanse from Koingo Software, I managed to get nearly 1GB of my precious drive space back. Not too shabby.
Overview
MacCleanse is actually very simple and calling this an in depth review would be stretching the meaning of the term "in depth" a bit. There is actually only one window and one button. You press it an MacCleanse goes to work. Basically, it knows about all locations where space wasting files live and deletes them.
When you first run the software, you should tell it, what you want deleted and what to stay away from. You have a wide range of options for that. From browser histories to chat transcripts and temporary files. The options are pretty extensive. Not all of it is really that useful to clean out in my opinion, though. You have to judge that for your individual usage case. Luckily, MacCleanse provides you with good descriptions of the individual categories and the individual items are named very descriptive, so selecting what to clean up is pretty easy.
When I ran the software the first time it saved me 862.4MB. Just for comparison, I ran it again today with the same settings and I cleaned out about 7MB. Now this 7MB were probably log files and a few cached files. I wouldn't advise to run MacCleanse every day, more like every couple of months. Those 862MB were collected over the course of nearly two years (the time since my last clean install of this system) and cache files are actually there for a reason. They speed up your system by having recently used data readily available to your operating system. Constantly deleting temp files and the likes will actually hurt your system performance.
So long story short, cleaning up is good, but being anal about it is only wasting your time.
Summary
Overall, I liked MacCleanse. It is an extremely focused tool and therefor something you won't (need to) run very often. But when you run it, it actually works extremely fast and doesn't hinder you in your workflow. It might be a bit pricey for such a limited usage case though.
MacCleanse is being developed by Koingo Software and sells for $19.95. There is a 15 day trial version available which you can download on their site.
As part of their support for this blog, Koingo is giving away one license for our readers. To win this slick baby, I invite you to leave a worthwhile comment below and we will pick a random lucky guy in the following week.
Pros
- extremely simple usage
- does what it does very well
- fast and intuitive
Contras
- a bit too expensive
Disclaimer
I received a test license for MacCleanse from Koingo Software in addition to the sponsoring of a giveaway license for this review.
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