Clean up, optimize and speed up your Mac with Cleaner One Pro

We're providing links to a free Mac cleaner and a free PC cleaner you can download. These tools will help you recover disk space and improve performance. And did we mention they're free?

We all clutter up our computers. Whether it's desktops filled with so many icons it's hard to find anything, or huge-but-no-longer-needed files left around for no reason, we generate a lot of data that really should be tossed.

Even if we're super-fastidious, our computers generate their own junk. New updates, uninstalls, extra translations, and ongoing usage create digital detritus that takes up precious storage space while bogging down performance.

While you could - if you had time and knew where to look - hunt down all your own leftover files and clean them, your Mac doesn't have a built-in way to find and remove this waste.

Here's where it gets messier. Back in the "before times" (before COVID-19 forced many of us to work from home), we often had a work computer and a home computer. But now, for many of us, our home computer is also our main work computer. And while the corporate IT team is still reachable, you can no longer just bring in your machine for them to clean and tune up. In a lot of small and large ways, you're on your own.

If you're using your personal MacBook or MacBook Pro, it's probably got less memory and storage than your work machine to begin with, so it's even more important to keep the clutter at bay.

In this article, we're spotlighting Cleaner One Pro, a program designed to help you wring as many cycles and gigabytes as you possibly can from your laptop.

Why is my Mac so slow? Here's how to fix it.

Once you install Cleaner One Pro, you're presented with a dashboard that features a few, easy-to-understand dials.

The easiest and fastest thing you can do to clean your Mac is click the Clean button under the Junk Files dial. Within a few minutes, Cleaner One Pro will scan your disk and clear out the most common and safe-to-remove files it can find. On the iMac used to write this article, that Clean button cleared almost five gigabytes of storage in what seemed like 5 seconds.

Next to the Junk Files dial is a Memory Usage dial, which reflects how much RAM your applications, operating system, and background processes are using. Applications often use blocks of RAM briefly, but they may not return those blocks back to the overall RAM pool for other applications to use when they're done. The Memory Usage dial has an Optimize button. When pressed, it finds as many of those blocks of RAM as it can and returns them to your computer's main RAM for use by other programs. This machine, which has 16GB RAM, was running very close to capacity at 14GB. Clicking the Optimize button returned almost half of the system's RAM back to the pool. 

This is very important for system performance. Macs use a memory management technique called "swapping." When there's too much in RAM, MacOS will swap data from RAM to storage. Back in the days of spinning disks, that storage was unbearably slow. Today's SSDs are faster, but they're still 20-30 times slower than RAM. If you can optimize your memory, you can reduce or eliminate swapping, which can result in you-can-actually-feel-it performance improvements.

How to clean and tune up your Mac

While we're on the topic of optimizations, we'll look at two tools that can help you answer the question, "How can I speed up my Mac?"

Once you click the System Optimizer button in Cleaner One Pro, you'll see a screen with a bunch of options on the left. The first one we'll look at is the Startup Manager. This tool allows you to customize what launches when your computer boots up.

On the Mac used for writing this article, we found a number of apps in the Login Items category that launched on startup that just weren't needed. We also found a few apps we actually wanted to start automatically that weren't doing so. With a quick flick of the toggle, those apps now run automatically.

Launch Agents is another category of launch items. These are background helper programs that run in support of system and user-installed applications. On this Mac, we found quite a few that supported hardware no longer installed on the system. This machine had been running them, using memory and processor capacity, for absolutely no reason. Cleaner One Pro for Mac enabled us to turn those off.

Next, we'll turn to deleting applications fully. This is often a problem in MacOS, where it might appear as though you've deleted an app, but in reality, there are still plenty of files still taking up space. Cleaner One Pro solves this. When you click into the App Manager, you're presented with a full list of installed apps and their supporting files. You can delete any individual supporting files or the application in its entirety.

How to clear up storage

When most laptops moved from spinning hard drives to SSDs, they got a lot faster. But since SSDs are more expensive, many laptops shipped with less storage than their hard drive-based cousins. It's not unusual to see 128GB or 256GB laptops, which is fine for surfing Facebook but can get quite constrained if you're trying to do any real work.

Fortunately, Cleaner One Pro excels in locating space hogs and cleaning them out. One of the most effective tools is the Disk Map capability. This tool allows you to see how storage is used across your entire drive. For example, it could tell you that photos are taking up many gigabytes of space, or that a video you produced a few months ago is really using a disproportionate amount of storage. It's a great starting point for reclaiming space.

Then there's the big hammer of Cleaner One Pro: the Big Files scan. This tool allows you to see the very largest files on your computer, so you can either back them up to another medium or delete them.

Cleaner One Pro also scans for and deletes Junk Files. This is a more powerful extension of the system scan we discussed at the beginning of this article. These files include system caches, unused disk images, application caches, logs, language files, and browser caches. Windows users can also use this tool to delete leftover Windows Update files.

There are two more space-reclamation features we particularly like: Duplicate Files and Similar Photos, both of which live up to their names. You can run both tools on a single folder, a folder tree, or an entire drive. What makes these so powerful compared with other duplicate finder utilities is the Compare window, so you can determine whether and which copy of a duplicated file to keep.

Why choose Cleaner One Pro?

Cleaner One Pro combines features from a variety of system optimization tools, adds some unique capabilities and intelligence, and can help you tune up your system. This free download is offered by Trend Micro, a leader in antivirus and system protection for more than 30 years.

Trend Micro has taken all its experience at examining low-level, under-the-hood system operations and applied it to the ultimate system tune-up tool.

Click here to download Cleaner One Pro for Mac.