

Is customizing your Mac considered work?) (TinkerTool provides access to so many hidden Mac preferences that you may never get around to actually working on your Mac.
#BEST FREE MAC MEMORY CLEANER APP MAC OS#
TinkerTool, like OS X and macOS, has evolved over time, though its primary purpose is still accessing and changing preference settings for various features of the Mac OS that aren’t available to the end user through the normal preference panes. Marcel Bresink, lets you easily and quickly customize the Mac OS. When I got my first copy of OS X Puma (10.1.x), TinkerTool allowed me to access and change many then “secret” Mac settings, such as preventing a Finder window from using the desktop as a background (boy, was that ever confusing), or allowing the Finder to display hidden files. TinkerTool has been around for just about as long as OS X. A better solution is to use an in-line thermal sensor, like those found here. This usage is usually caused by the replacement drive not supporting the Mac’s firmware-based drive temperature sensor. One thing I don’t like to see anyone do is use the app to slow down a drive’s cooling fan after a replacement. Both reassigning a sensor and setting a constant speed can be useful if you find your Mac has a damaged sensor, the cost of replacement is too high, and the repair isn’t covered under warranty. But if a sensor should fail, you can assign a nearby sensor to take over the control function, or set the fan to a constant speed using no sensor data. Normally, the cooling process is automatically controlled by your Mac’s thermal management system. Macs Fan Control can take over the control of a fan’s speed by using the various temperature sensors built into your Mac. But it doesn’t stop there if you have a need, you can change the speed of a fan, perhaps increasing the speed on those hot, humid summer days, or slowing a fan down temporarily when you and your Mac are in the middle of a jam session, recording a new tune you’ve been working on.īut, wait, there’s more. Macs Fan Control can also display the RPM of your Mac’s cooling fans. (Ever wonder what the CPU core temperature is? Macs Fan Control can tell you in near real time.)

If you ever want to know just how hot your CPU, GPU, or memory are, Macs Fan Control can display the temperature of any of them, either in the menu bar or within the app’s window. Macs Fan Control, available from CrystalIdea, is able to monitor all of the various temperature sensors scattered about the internals of your Mac. This is another Mac utility that can live in your menu bar and provide near real-time data about your Mac’s internal temperatures and fan speeds. At one time, Activity Monitor could display memory information in its Dock icon, but that useful ability is gone. Memory Clean is a good replacement for some capabilities lost in recent versions of the Mac’s Activity Monitor. Closing an offending app frees up RAM and puts a bit of pep back into my Mac.

Instead, I look at the Memory Clean list of apps that are consuming the most memory. Memory Clean can be set to auto clean memory at the threshold level, but I leave that option turned off. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve noticed my Mac running slow, and looked up to see the red Memory Clean icon. You can also set a threshold, and if the free memory drops below that level, the menu bar icon turns red, letting you know you’re experiencing low memory. What I like is its ability to display the amount of free memory available directly in the menu bar. I’m not sure about that, but I will say it’s one of the better ways to monitor how your Mac’s memory is being used, how much free memory is still available, and which apps are hogging your Mac’s RAM. Memory Clean 2 from FIPLAB (basic version is free) is described as the ultimate app for optimizing your Mac’s memory. (Memory Clean can tell you how your RAM is being used, and which apps are gorging on memory it can also free up RAM space with just a click.) Yet…there it is in my menu bar: Memory Clean, my favorite memory cleaning app. While there’s some truth to that point of view, most of the time you’re better off letting your Mac take care of memory management, something it’s very good at it. They can do more harm than good by clearing out inactive memory that may be used again by an app or service.” While utilities come and go on my Mac, these five seem to always have a home they provide just the features I need to make using my Mac easier. How is that possible? Because I sometimes forget which ones I’ve already tried, and I end up taking a new version of an old utility for a spin. I’ve probably deleted more utilities than have been created for the Mac. Speaking from personal experience, downloading and trying out new Mac utilities can quickly become an addiction.
