Hands-on review: CleanMyMac 3 software

Being a Mac user, we often laugh at the disk scans and defragmentations that Windows users do on a regular basis.

But then I stumbled across this tool called CleanMyMac and wanted to give it a try.

First of all, the interface is clean and fun to use. It's visual and shows you what tile of maintenance task it's completing at any one time.

There are so many individual types of maintenance tasks that you can do with the tool that they've bundled them all up into a Smart Cleanup routine, which does all the key ones in one go.

I've got a MacBook Air with a fixed hard drive of 120GB, and this was nearly full.

After first running the Smart Cleanup, it identified over 4GB of unnecessary files that it could clean. On my system, out of the numerous areas it looked at, the two key areas were System Junk and Localisation files. These two represented almost all of my space savings.

I went ahead, and within a few minutes, it had completed all the necessary maintenance.

I personally didn't experience a notable speed increase in the machine, but I did feel satisfied, and it definitely freed up some much-needed hard drive space.

Although, one of the areas where other reviewers have experienced speed increases has been in the bloated Mail application, which I don't use.

The app does install a menu item that monitors applications and notifies you if an app has potentially frozen, and asks if you want to close it.

After the initial scan, you do get occasional reminders that you need to rerun it, although these tend to be much less satisfying as they only save a few hundred megabytes of hard disk space.

The part of the app that is a killer feature, in my opinion, and that appeals to my undiagnosed OCD is the uninstall feature.

I've tried many apps, and mainly I don't continue to use them after an initial reason for use. The problem with a Mac is that we don't like our Windows comrades have an easy uninstall feature.

This is all dealt with; you can either initiate a full uninstall from within the CleanMyMac app, or when you drag the app you want to remove to the trash, it asks you if you want to clean up all the other related files.

I haven't had any issues with the app; it's fast, satisfying and effective.

If you're running low on disk space on your Mac and don't want to drag around an external hard drive, then it's a good purchase.