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The bad news: Mac OS gets slow, gets 'dirty' and gets viruses.

The good news: It's much more unlikely on Mac than on Windows. You can 'just use it' for longer time with fewer problems.

> How to 'clean' Mac book pro?
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Make a last (Time Machine) backup before starting the Mac from an Install CD or USB Stick. Format the drive and install Mac OS.
I'm doing this roughly every two years.

> Do we need to format it and reinstall the os?
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Yes.
A fresh install is the only safe way to defrag files over 20 MB and get rid of thousands of old cache, driver, temp-files, startup and kernel extensions from programs that are not used anymore.
Searching and deleting them by hand would take hours and is dangerous for the stability of the OS and other programs, if you delete the wrong files. And defrag-tools could damage your filesystem and/ or costs extra money.

> In gen what are the maintaining guidelines for keeping it virus free and long smooth operation?
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The most common (of the few) viruses are found by Mac OS itself. Just use the Mac OS 'Software Update' to get the newest virus definitions and the Security Bugfixes.

For a 'normal' use of Mac OS no maintenance is needed.

But if you try out many programs/ utilities/ extensions and record/ work with a lot media files (like me), I advise you to do two checks from time to time or if you think the Mac is slower than usual:

- One is to use the program 'Activity Monitor' and sort the listed processes by three columns: "CPU Time", "Active Memory", "Private Memory". Look each time if a process uses a lot more cpu/ memory than the others. I search Google for help to get rid of it (or to learn that I better should not touch it :-)
Most of the time the wasteful processes are the ones you should not delete... like Safari, iPhoto or EyeTV

- The second uses Spotlight to search for big files which were temporary and were not deleted. Or cache files gone wild ("Oh, there are the missing 5 GB" ;-). Or personal files like movies which could be moved to an external harddisk.
To find ALL files you have to add the search options to show 'hidden files' and 'system files'. To find only the big files use the option 'greater than 200 (or maybe 500) MB'.
The reason for this is to keep as much of the harddisk space free for the OS to cache, save and auto-defrag. Some people suggest 10% or 20%.
My experience is that it gets really slow if the free space falls below 10 GB.

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