Apple’s annual free OS X updates are great, as well as a reminder that it’s time to do some housecleaning on your Mac. Enter Titanium Software’s venerable OnyX (free). Now updated for OS X 10.10 Yosemite in version 2.9, OnyX continues to be our tool of choice for cleaning up the cruft that occasionally accumulates on a well-used Mac, particularly across multiple app and OS X updates. It’s a relatively safe way to give your machine a general performance tune-up.
Load up OnyX and it will do a quick startup disk scan, as well as a S.M.A.R.T. status verification for those users still working with legacy spinning disks as opposed to SSDs. You’re then presented with a nice set of pre-defined options for cleaning everything up from purging caches—great if you’re running tight on disk space—to verifying and repairing system files and permissions, to rebuilding system indexes that may have become corrupted or simply bloated. Once you’re done, you should find that your system runs at least a little bit faster, and gains disk space in the process. It’s a great way to breathe some life back into a slower Mac without having to resort to a full OS X reinstall.
