Rich's Tongfamily

I almost never have the open time to get on a busy Mac and I don’t want to an update things without checking things first, but if you do have a setup that involved an Intel MacBook Pro 256GB and a Samsung Q60 monitor, here are some notes on things to do:

1. The Samsung Q60 is a nice 43″ television, but it doubles very effectively as a 4K monitor for a 13″ MacBook Pro, that computer even at 30 fps does a very nice job of handling things, but it does need some maintenance.
2. The big one is that it does get blown off the network. I suddenly discovered that this Apple Airplay 2 device was no longer seen on the network. And no amount of going to Setting/Network/Wifi and trying to connect would work. I finally did a Settings/Network/Network Reset and this seemed to help it, so be warned, if you stop seeing this.
3. Then if you have time, you can go through the laborious process of deinstalling all the applications that are default loaded onto the TV. It is really nice it is an internet device, but Samsung is definitely getting money loading stringe applications there. They are probably harmless but they could be security threat, so go to the Menu > App Store and then on each application, you long press the remote and then you can choose delete.
4. There are some good applications though like Disney Plus, Netflix, Apple TV, and Apple Music, Amazon Prime Video that you probably want and depending on who you want to give you data to there is Alexa and Google Assistant. Personally, I’m kind of a Apple > Amazon > Google, so I ended up using Alexa. You are going to spend a lot of time typing passwords, but all of these now have a web connection, so have your phone with you. Amazon is the slickest, just have your phone running the Amazon application and then use the visual QR code by pointing your camera to it and it sets it all up. Apple is pretty annoying because you have to login separately to the TV and the Music application. Also, you can definitely confuse the login system, so I had to on my phone logout on the web and then it worked.

Now on to cleaning the Mac, here are some quick notes if you only have limited time:

1. Install home-brew, this is an invaluable utility that does automatic updating, so then when you get on the machine you can do a brew update && brew upgrade and everything is new.
2. Go to Safari and look at the extensions loaded, for instance on this machine, Alextech, had installed a malicious application that was taking search clicks and pushing them to Yahoo. Probably a bad click. So, make sure you uninstall all the extensions you do not see.
3. Now make sure you have the best Antivirus installed. My current favorite of the free ones is AVG Antivirus, there are other good ones like Avast, but the free ones are decent and start the scan.
4. When you get that list do a brew search to see if Homebrew has these. Then you can always update them.
5. Make sure to ask and ask again, if they wouldn’t like NordVPN (and set if for connect automatically) and 1Password, they are definitely worth it and again more secure. NordVPN can be cranky, so let them know that if there is a problem, they can hit Pause for an hour and do more work.
6. Go to Siri and search for System Information or click on the Apple and About and the System Report is the graphical way to get there. This gives the state of the machine, but in Windows > Storage Management, Apple has built a nice analysis of disk, make sure to click delete Trash after 30 days and
7. Look at Document Large Files and start seeing what the heck is there. It is pretty incredibly what gets dumped here. Click on the Downloads tab and see what junk is there. One unintuitive thing here is that when you click on Size to get the biggest documents, it actually sorts the newest documents first so you won’t see the older big downloads unless you scroll all the way down.
8. Now click on Applications and you can see all the applications and delete the ones you are no longer using, it is really nice to see their sizes as well.
9. Keep walking down the left and get to Developer, see if you have code caches which you don’t need if you are not writing software, then do Containers and Unsupported Applications.
10. The final tab is the useful view that sorts your data by size so you can see what is really eating up space
11. Then moving down, you might have things like Music Creation which are old GarageBand files, again easy to delete. And you can be shocked at how much space the videos and things you are sending on Messages is
12. This 256GB Mac is barely big enough for the average user, it has 80GB free after all this cleanup which is a good reminder that 512GB is really the minimum these days even for light users. Then go to Download and you will see lots of DMGs and other junk, so delete those. Doing all this I was able to find another 40GB so the machine is half full which is pretty good.