Keeping your Mac running smoothly (by no means a complete treatise)
I know of nothing on a Mac that needs tweaking other than to empty the trash, delete duplicate files and photos, clean out the Downloads folder, and delete all old email messages - all of which you need to do on your own, and regularly.
If you want to have something to automatically clean up your computer, then either ONYX (free, requires some manual process) or CleanMyMac X (pay, one-click does it all) can do that much better than I can and in much less time. But not even these apps will clean out your Downloads folder, clean up your email, and find duplicate files and photos. For that, unfortunately you are on your own. There are apps for finding duplicate files and photos. But even those apps require a bit of manual tedium to finish what they find unless you don’t care what they think are duplicates and delete for you.
So, tips for cleaning out the Downloads folder:
Delete any file ending in .dmg, .pkg, .dll, .exe, or .msi (And why on earth did you download a .exe or .msi file? That’s for Windows only.)
If the file ends in .zip or .gz, then it is a compressed package possibly containing several files. It may contain photos, documents, or be an application in compressed format. Double-click on it to uncompress it. It will create a folder or file by the same name. Examine the contents of the folder. If you want to keep the contents, move the folder to another place on the computer. If you don’t need it, delete the folder. Delete the .zip or .gz file regardless.
If the file ends in .ttf, it is a font file. If you don’t know what to do with a font file, delete it.
Some files may have a number in parentheses before the last period in the filename - that means it is a duplicate. Delete it. It’s time to figure out why you are downloading the same file over and over.
For any file that is an image or a document, you need to decide if you want to keep it and move the file to an appropriate folder - like Pictures for images, Movies, for videos, and Documents for everything else.
Delete everything else that you haven’t moved to a better place for safe-keeping.
Use the spacebar to get an instant preview of a file. If you don’t know what it is for or you know you don’t need it, delete it.
Organizing your files, photos, and stuff:
How to organize pictures, videos, and documents only matters to type A personalities. With the search feature in Finder, it’s easy to find anything anywhere on your computer. And with the Group feature in Finder, it’s easy to sort items in a folder by any of several methods to make finding something easier.
However, it can make your computer seem to run faster if do organize things in folders and subfolders. Having everything in one folder does make a computer run slower than it should. And even having thousands of items in a single folder can slow things down. So, for the sake of keeping your computer running fast, organize everything by kind and purpose, delete stuff you don’t need anymore, and archive everything else on a separate drive that you need for legal and tax purposes.
For e-mail, that’s another story. I manage my e-mail on a daily basis so there’s no real work for me to clean up anything. But I am a pack rat, and I do keep hundreds of old messages efficiently organized in mailboxes where they are easy to forget about and also easy to find. And by saving messages in separate mailboxes, I keep the number of messages in my Inbox fairly small - just the stuff I need to pay attention to and deal with. I’ve sometimes have had to find a message from as far back as four years, and with the search function in Mail I don’t even have to remember which folder I put it in.
Oh, did I forget to mention that owning a computer is like owning a business?
John R Carter Sr
