Despite our natural aversion (as slobs) to its name and our disappointment with prior releases, Aladdin’s Spring Cleaning 5.0 is a program we really wanted to like. The difference in this version is Mac OS X, of course. The program comes with separate installers for Mac OS X and earlier Mac OSs, and both do their cleaning tasks in any system installed on the Mac, so you can clean up your OS 9 disk from within OS X and vice versa.
Those cleaning tasks include the old standards, such as Alias Fixer, Font Finder, MacUninstaller, and Orphaned Pref Finder. There are also some new features; our favorites are Internet Cache Finder, which helps you clean and manage your various browser cookie, history, and cache files, and MailCleaner, which deals with rogue email attachments (Aladdin sells those last two in stand-alone form as iClean for $29.99).
Since Spring Cleaning is billed as the ultimate Mac uninstaller, we’re miffed that it doesn’t have a magic Uninstall button (like the one included in many programs’ installers) to purge an app and its accessory support files; the closest thing is MacUninstaller, which returns a list of related files as well as documents created with the target app. Spring Cleaning is still essentially a glorified search engine, like Sherlock, only it has action items such as delete, archive, move, launch, duplicate, or exclude items from future searches built into its interface.
We’ll preempt the inevitable question, “What about Mac OS X permissions?” You can launch Spring Cleaning in Super Access mode, which prompts you for an Administrator password once at the beginning of the session and then lets you raise all the hell you want. Obviously this opens the door to hosing your system severely, so approach with caution. And be glad there’s a Restore feature, which can undo most of Spring Cleaning’s procedures.
Spring Cleaning reveals files deep in the bowels of your hard drive: Orphaned Pref Finder led us to Hard Drive > Users > niko > Library > Preferences > PMKey 3 ncoucouvanis. Too bad that’s an application’s license key — trashing it would disable the app, which is still installed on the Mac. Oops.
Spring Cleaning is a good chaperone for the brave new world of Mac OS X, but ultimately it still doesn’t do much more than you can do by spending a little quality time with Sherlock. If that scares you, get Spring Cleaning.
Coucouvanis, Niko. (September 2002). Spring Cleaning 5.0. MacAddict. (pg. 54).
Aladdin Systems, Inc.
System
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14 / 
2021-11-12 / 
0afacea944aac23b4ea971a27373d73a1b06a580 / 
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SpringCleaning5.0.1OSX.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
