On Fri, October 28, 2016 00:03, HP3000-L automatic digest system wrote:

> Date:    Thu, 27 Oct 2016 14:15:59 -0700
> From:    John Lee <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: Mac question
>
> Any Mac experts out there?  My college daughter says her Mac needs
> some cleaning/maintenance and that MacPaw and CleanMyMac3 are highly
> rated by users.  Anyone got any experience with this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> John Lee
>

tl;dr

My experience with third party maintenance applications for my
MacBookPro is that they are generally worthless.

Full text:

What are the symptoms?  What kind of Mac? How old is the hardware?
What is the version of OSX running on the host?  What kind of mass
storage media is used?

If this is a new machine or only a couple of years old then has
she/you contacted Apple service for a diagnostic and possible
remediation?  Apple service prices are quite often no more expensive
then some of these applications and their work is guaranteed

Of course, before doing anything else, get a full backup of the user's
home directory tree onto a removable medium like a flash drive.  And
do not count time-machine backups if you have them.  Those are not as
flexible to recover from as a straight 'cp -pr' whenever a possible
reinstall is in the offing.

If she/you can boot into recovery mode (Command (&#8984;)-R for local
and  Option-Command (&#8984;)-R for Internet [requires a network link
of course]) you may then use the on-board diagnostics and disk repair
tools.  These can verify, and often correct, many of the problems that
sometimes arise in Macs that have had several years of use.  My own
MBpro is 8 years old but runs OSX-10.11.5 with no more problems (there
are some boot issues with video display described below) than I
encountered after going to 10.8 in 2012.  I have not yet updated to
10.12.1.

There are known problems with booting older macs running more recent
OSX versions.  These allegedly result from artefacts left behind
following multiple OSX upgrades.  There is also an unacknowledged
problem with the video drivers used when booting recent OSX versions
running on older Intel Hardware (~2011 and earlier). Third-party
"cleaners" do not deal with either in my experience.

The fix for the former is to reformat the mass storage and reinstall a
clean OS using the most recent supported OSX released for your
hardware; followed by copying back your user's home directory tree
from the aforementioned backup.

The fix for the latter is to boot into safe mode which reportedly
eradicates artefacts in various system caches and then reboot
normally.

Both approaches have worked for me in the past and both usually work
to deal with the specific problem they address. However, both
occasionally fail.  In particular the video display issue seems to be
fixed on a hit and miss basis. Several reboots into safe mode are
sometime required to get a regular boot to complete.

The problem is not with the boot process. That does not actually fail.
What happens is that one cannot see anything on the (suddenly black)
screen to select the user and input the password.  Everything else
(keyboard, mouse, etc.) is actually working and if you can set things
up to get through the authentication from memory then the the boot
completes and the screen come back to life.  Nobody has provided any
explanation for this behaviour but safe booting first usually seems to
fix it for the next regular boot.

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James B. Byrne                mailto:[log in to unmask]
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
9 Brockley Drive              vox: +1 905 561 1241
Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
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