The teachers who use Macs in the school where I work come in two groups. Those who leave their Macs alone and let me do the maintenance work. And those who like to tinker around.
If your Mac is working fine, let it continue to work fine. But if you’re ready to tinker around and try a few things a good place to start is Yasu. Y-A-S-U. Yet Another System Utility for Mac users.
Learn To Walk, Then Run
Here’s the basic deal about Mac maintenance. You shouldn’t have to worry about it. Mac OS X is designed to do what’s necessary to keep itself healthy and running without too many problems.
So, do you need a system maintenance utility?
Here’s one problem many new Mac users encounter. Many Mac system maintenance functions are designed to run in the middle of the night. When your Mac is likely turned off.
There are caches to flush, cron scripts to run, logs to delete and even lesser important functions like clearing font caches, clearing browser caches, removing cookies, even clearing Safari bookmark icons.
Important? Yes. What can you do to help make your Mac a clean and mean computing machine, and learn a little about what goes on inside?
Yasu.
What It Do, And What It Don’t Do
There are a dozen or so utilities that do what Yasu does, some free, some not, some more comprehensive, most more complex and complicated. Yasu is a simple app that lets you run a number of the Mac’s maintenance scripts and routines with little effort.
Actually, the effort is almost zero. If you can click, you can run Yasu.
What Yasu doesn’t do is solve problems whenever your Mac goes wonky. Yasu also doesn’t unlock a bunch of hidden features on your Mac so you can really dig into the system. More on that to come.
Clean and neat. Yasu gives you specific functions and a check box. Most are self explanatory. None, when checked, should cause any additional grief to your Mac.
If you’re new to the Mac or new to tinkering on a Mac, Yasu is a good place to start. It’s not intimidating or dangerous. Click. Click. Click OK.
What else can you do to tinker around on your Mac?
When you’re ready to outgrow Yasu, step into Onyx, Maintenance, or Deeper—three Mac apps that move your Mac tinkering experience to the next level.
Run system maintenance utilities, unlock a few hidden parameters in the Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Safari and elsewhere on your Mac. Even enable and disable a number of hidden functions. These tools won’t harm your Mac but give you an idea of other ways to customize your Mac experience.
About Natalia Nowak
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