Prepare your Mac for OS X Mountain Lion with CleanMyMac

A If you had recently bought a Mac, then cleaning your Mac’s hard drive is more about sticking to a few simple advice:

• Regularly look through your hard drives to find unnecessary files and remove them to Trash. Empty your Trash every now and then.
• Move old and archived files to DVD-disks, thumb drives or other external storages.
• Remove unused applications by moving the corresponding files from the Applications folder to Trash.

If you’re an advanced Mac user, then there are more ways to clean up your Mac and thus free more space before Mountain Lion installation (or for any other reason possible). In short, you can

• clean web browser and application caches. In most situations caches speed up your Mac, but sometimes they become outdated and simply clutter the hard drive of your Mac. Clean caches to reclaim another few gigabytes. New and better optimized cache files will be generated by applications automatically on their next launch.
• delete useless system files, such as localization files for languages you don’t use, universal binaries to support architectures other than you current Mac has and so on.
• remove application leftovers that can remain on your HDD or SSD even after you had uninstalled those applications.

A If you are upgrading from Lion to Mountain Lion, then you need 8 GB for installation files and additional 15% of free hard disk space for the system to work stably after installation, as practice shows.

To know how much hard drive space you have (free and occupied) open Finder, choose one of your hard drives and click Get Info in the contextual menu. Alternatively, you can get the similar info via Apple’s Disk Utility.

Free up the necessary amount of space by methods described above or buy an additional hard drive (in this case we recommend you to buy SSD drives, since they are much faster than HDDs).

If you have Mac OS X Snow Leopard, you will need to upgrade to Lion before upgrading to Mountain Lion. 4 GB of free space will be enough room for Lion upgrade, but the same 15% of free hard drive space are needed to ensure stable performance.

A First of all, check your Mac compatibility with Mountain Lion here: http://www.apple.com/osx/specs/

If it is, then do the following:

1. Launch Software Update through Spotlight or by clicking the corresponding option in the upper left Apple menu. The app will check whether all of your apps are up-to-date and will offer to upgrade those that are not.
2. Back up your files using Apple’s Time Machine or any third party solution. Upgrading to Mountain Lion is totally safe for your Mac, and backing up important information is a measure for anticipating unexpected issues, such as a blackout or a detail breakdown in your Mac.
3. Download and install CleanMyMac to free up additional gigabytes of space if necessary. On average CleanMyMac cleans approximately 8 GB on its first launch. Also, use CleanMyMac to completely remove unneeded applications, plugins, widgets and preference panes.

Now, get ready to install Mountain Lion!

A Now that your Mac is ready for upgrade, open the Mac App Store and purchase Mountain Lion just like you purchase any other app. After that Mountain Lion will be downloaded. Now you can open this file and follow further instructions to install it and upgrade Mac OS X to Mountain Lion.