MacKeeper: A Must-Own Disk Cleaner for Your Mac

When my iMac began slowing down, I blamed it on the graphics files that I kept creating and storing on my hard drive. I tried deleting some of the files that I knew I would never use again to see if my computer's performance would speed up. Not only did this fail to work, but I found that the programs I used everyday started to crash. Something was going on, although I didn't know what until I found MacKeeper, an all-in-one utility that cleans Mac hard drives.

I decided to download the free trial based on the glowing reviews that I read online. The installation was straightforward, as was the interface. MacKeeper has video tutorials for each of its subprograms that do a good job of explaining how to use the One-Click scanner, Disk Usage, Wise Uninstaller, Login Items, Data Encryptor, and Anti-Theft tools.

The performance on my iMac was so bad that the One-Click often hung up MacKeeper, and I would have to force quit to start over. I noticed right away that I had over 20 gigs in the cache. That was the culprit. Somehow, my research gathering software had dumped all of my search findings into the cache.

Once I found out what the problem was, I had to figure out how to solve it. I solved it by manually going into the cache and dumping the offending files (all 500,000 of them) into the trash. Two hours later and an empty trash can later, I started playing around with MacKeeper.

Binaries Cutter: Removes the old PowerPC platform in your applications because it takes up space.

Cache Cleaner: Does exactly what the name implies.

Duplicates Finder: I was amazed by how many duplicate files that were sitting on my hard drive.

Languages Cutter: Programs like Microsoft Word come with a large language pack that takes up valuable space. The languages cutter utility deletes every language that you don't need so that you can have more space.

Logs Cleaner: Does exactly what the name implies.

Old Files Finder: Delete old files that have been sitting on your hard drive for years.

Disk Usage: This utility allowed me to find many preference files from programs that I had deleted several years ago.

Wise Uninstaller: Just because you drag a program to the trash and empty it does not mean that it's gone from your hard drive.

I have yet to test out all the features on MacKeeper because my focus has been on cleaning up my hard drive. So far I'm very impressed by this utility program. Because of MacKeeper, I have regained 60Gs of memory and my programs are no longer crashing.