Spring Cleaning is a chocolate box of different system administration tools for tidying up your Mac OS. Each year its panels get a new graphical interface and a few more tools are added.

Included in the 9.0 bundle are 20 small applications for searching out files. These are all located under the Clean Up tab in the main window and offer quite a range of options. A further handful of maintenance tools, including a useful new addition called Housekeeping Scripts Runner, and a separate Task Scheduler are in the package, too.

Searching for files

You can search for files by size, by type, by association with other applications or by when they were last accessed, among other options. Each search is customisable. You can apply filters and rules to searches before you run them, too.

When the results come back you get options of what to do with the files. First you select the files you want to action and then choose from a drop-down menu of actions to be applied. We went hunting for files to clean off the system and free up space, so we used the Move to Trash action more often than not.

After the system was free of duplicates, empty folders and files that weren't likely to ever be used - like foreign language help files for example - we then ran searches for files that were in the wrong place, like music files that should be in our iTunes Library but had been lazily imported to the Mac and ended up in a Desktop folder.

We also cleaned out old caches, and unwanted temporary files, which seems a good point to inject a word of warning; be sure of what you are deleting. Often searches returned required system files that innocently matched the search criteria, and to the untrained eye, or person who rushes to delete, these might be removed in error.

There is nothing startlingly original about performing these tasks in the OS, but it's nice to able to do so from inside one application. With a bit more elbow grease you could do the same using Finder, your Trash can and a mouse - but it would take considerably longer and you would miss any files with exotic extension names that you can't remember.