This weekend my cousin, Devin Henley, taught me about two excellent Macintosh utility programs that I have been needing for some time.
The first, WhatSize, is a great free utility for OS X that scans your mounted volumes and shows how big each folder and subfolder is. This makes it pretty easy to locate large files on your computer so you can either delete them directly from the WhatSize program, or archive them to another hard drive or removable media and then delete them.
The second program, AppleJack, is again a free program, but in this case open source. Once installed on your system, you can boot into single user mode in OS X (hold down command-S at startup) and run the AppleJack utility. It runs disk first aid, repairs permissions, and clears out cache files.
Dan Frakes has a good review of AppleJack as well as other OS X troubleshooting tools, including Preferential Treatment. It can be used to find corrupted preference files, which can cause problems.
Great tools, thanks for the tips Devin! 🙂
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