That way, I can be sure everything is being caught.ĭr.Cleaner claims to be “the number one free Mac cleaning app”. So I like to have competing apps doing the same job. You might think two cleaning tools is extreme overkill, but when AVG Cleaner says it has found everything, Dr. This is another cleaning tool, which I use alongside AVG Cleaner. The Disk Cleaner finds and nukes unnecessary files, while the Duplicate Finder finds duplicate files on your system, and gives you the opportunity to review and delete. The names are pretty much self-explanatory. The first part is the Disk Cleaner, and the second part the Duplicate Finder. As the name suggests, this app does not focus at all on viruses, but instead on finding and removing unnecessary files. AVG CleanerĪs well as the regular AVG anti-virus software, AVG also provides a separate standalone product called AVG Cleaner.

On the whole though, Avira is one of the top-shelf products out there in the field, so false positives don’t occur very often. So legitimate files and apps may get wrongly flagged and removed. This is where Avira looks at apps to check for any suspicious code.īut enable this at your own risk, because code which Avira considers suspicious and what you do may not be quite the same. With the Mac version of Avira, as well as viruses, things which are checked for include spyware, backdoors, phishing, as well as what is called “heuristic detection”. On my Windows PC, I run it alongside AVG, and sometimes Avira is faster and more accurate than AVG. When it comes to virus detection, one of the leaders in the field is German-made Avira Anti-Virus. It’s better to keep something and be safe, rather than delete it in haste and watch your Mac self-destruct. It goes without saying though that if you are unsure about one of the options, do NOT mark it for deletion. It also speeds through the operating system and removes all unnecessary dreck clogging up the pipes, as well as emptying the trash bin.

Originally called “Crap Cleaner” (hence the extra ‘C’ at the start), this cross-platform app goes through the temp files, caches, and browsing histories of each installed browser. This is probably the best known app of the lot, when it comes to system maintenance.

How to scan files for viruses on mac