Will Dr. Cleaner make your Mac run like new?

There are many disk cleanup tools and memory optimisation utilities, but there may be room for one more and this one is an interesting app. Dr. Cleaner is from security company Trend Micro and it cleans and optimises.

Perhaps saying your Mac will run like new is a slight exaggeration, but it aims to help OS X and your apps run better and by cleaning junk files off the disk drive results the idea is that there is less clutter and more disk space.

Dr Cleaner is a menu bar extra that can be set to automatically run on startup. It displays the memory used as a percentage, which is useful, but more information is displayed when it is clicked. This reveals a drop-down panel that shows the memory usage and disk space that can be cleaned.

Click the menu button (three dots) and there is a description of the memory usage showing the app memory, file cache, wired, compressed and used. The used figure in Dr. Cleaner is clearly the sum of the four types.

It is worth keeping an eye on the amount used and if it gets close to 100%, it means your Mac could benefit from a RAM upgrade. Memory usage is a complicated subject and even when it is all used and none is free, OS X still lets you start new apps and carry on working. It just works more slowly. Provided there is some free memory, the Mac will run at full speed.

There is an Optimize button to force OS X to clean up the memory and Dr. Cleaner also performs some cleaning automatically, such as when you quit an application. Does this make the Mac better? In some ways it does, but in other ways it doesn’t. With Dr. Cleaner, more memory is free, but also more is compressed. The free memory makes loading new apps faster, but when data is needed in the compressed memory it is slightly slower to access.

Memory management is built into OS X. Has Apple been doing it wrong all these years? Do Apple's OS X programmers not know how to do memory management? I am not conviced most people benefit from a memory manager. Some may, depending on how they use their Mac, but I don't use one and haven't seen any benefit when I have.

The Disk section of Dr Cleaner shows the amount of space that can be reclaimed by removing junk files. Click the menu button and it explains what these junk file are - mainly caches.

Caches speed up the Mac by storing frequently used data where it can easily be accessed. By clearing the caches you will slow down the computer. For example, I started GIMP, a free photo editor, and it took 10 seconds to start up. I used Dr Cleaner to optimise the memory and clear the junk, then started GIMP again. This time it took 2m 20s. (It’s a mechanical disk drive, not an SSD.)

This is an extreme case and the reason it takes so long is because GIMP caches things it needs. If the caches are cleared it must recreate them again and this takes time. We all have apps on the disk that we rarely or never use, and apps that have been removed. Clearing these caches will free up disk space, but as all caches are cleared, you lose some useful ones. They are always recreated the next time the app runs though (which means that space recovered is then lost aagain).

Do not clean caches. The only time you need to clear caches off the disk drive is when there is a problem. If an app is not behaving correctly or there are weird effects and faults, try clearing the caches. It sometimes cures it. Your Mac will be slower until those caches are built up again.

There is a Deep Disk Clean function and this scans the disk drive for junk files. It shows the size of the Trash folder, which is useful and people frequently forget to empty it regularly. The feature I liked best was the application leftovers that consisted of files and folders left behind when apps were removed. Dr. Cleaner also detects when apps are move to the Trash and cleans up after them automatically, which is really useful. There are also various caches that can be deleted to free up space too.

There is a function to find big files and after scanning the disk, the biggest are listed and can be deleted. This may be useful, but I found that I needed all the files anyway.

There are some useful functions in Dr Cleaner and it may help on some, but not all, Macs to optimise memory. Clearing caches can slow down the Mac, but might be useful occasionally for fixing faults, and clearing junk files can free up disk space if you are running short. Excessive cleaning can be detrimental to performance, so I prefer not to run DR. Cleaner all the time and only run it when it is needed.

Title: Dr. Cleaner
Price: Free
Developer: Trend Micro
Size: 7.5 MB
Version: 2.0.0
OS X: 10.9 or later, 64-bit