Stellar Speedup Mac Review

The new SpeedUp software tool from Stellar promises to speed up your Mac up to 25%. Let’s see if that’s true and try to find out how it works.

The Need for Speed

Let’s be clear about this. There is no such thing as a magic bullet as far as computer speedup is concerned. Computers fill up with stuff over time, and there’s nothing you can do about that apart from an unseemly and frankly impossible refusal to save nothing and store nothing on your machine. This takes work and time, things few of us can spare.

So your machine fills up, and with that load of files and backups and other detritus comes a creeping slowdown. You can’t get away from it.

In Use

Installation is easy. Just drag the icon into your applications folder, and you’re good to go.

The developers have tried to make initial startup easy and quick by going for the option of having a giant button with “Speedup Now” written on it. That is what is known in the trade as “cutting to the chase.”

Once the system has initialised,

you are presented with options. There is a custom scan where you can choose the volumes to scan, but it’s easy and fast to just go with the defaults, which is whatever volumes you have mounted. In the future, you might want to exclude certain volumes from the scan because they are backup or single purpose drives.

Scanning is an easy, although really lengthy, process.

You do, however, get a running total of how much stuff has been identified as being dead weight on your system as a big number you can see from across the room. If the scan takes hours, then this is a boom because you don’t want to have to sit right by the machine the whole time to check progress.

Finally, after much grinding of discs, you are presented with the results. First you see a summary, giving you the option of using the paid version to clean up to 50% more stuff from your system.

The full results gives you the option, and we think you should take it, of checking each of the files the system says are extraneous just in case it’s wrong.

There is a lot of dead weight in your system; it’s almost guaranteed.

Warning: Be Choosy

It’s tempting to just go with the defaults, just accept the analysis of your machine, and just delete everything suggested. That would be unwise, at least for the first few times. Although PPC software no longer works, a number of old style Universal Intel binaries might still be useful to you. Carefully go through the list of possibilities in case you might be able to free up space by deleting programs you use.

Price

We have gotten very used to paying very small amounts for software with the iOS and Google Play stores, but serious software, especially if it comes from a reasonably small software developer, costs money to make and sell, so you have to be ready to pay. In this case, I think $34.99 is not exactly extortionate, and if you need software for Mac cleanup, then you should pay the man and feel good about it.

Conclusion

Stellar SpeedUp Mac is a good solid and reliable product. To be brutally honest, it’s not the best or prettiest looking Mac cleanup software on the block, but we’ll take reliable and gentle to your system over shallow good looks any day. If you want to clean up your system on a regular basis and keep things running sweet, then SpeedUp Mac would be a good choice.

If you have anything to add or have any experience with SpeedUp Mac you’d like to share, please let us know in the comments below.