Default Finder window contents when opened from Dock

What a great tool. I am reviewing the report but not being experienced user it's hard to know what to zero in on. But very user friendly and nicely laid out. I do have one or two "clean up" utilities and I know they are a double-edged sword. I will follow EtreCheck's recommendations. Surprised to see that my SSD is considered slow.

I don't think that any of these have appeared recently or are being regenerated and my machine seems to be behaving well. (Actually, it has a new lease on life and better than new from a hardware point of view, being a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with a 1TB WD SSD).

I'm just wanting to tidy up and this will my project for today...

Here are two screenshots.

The first shows all the weirdly named folders above Acrobat:

The second shows all or at least the majority of the files with "hieroglyphic" names:

I very much appreciate your help.

Yes! Thank you. I’ve been trying to figure that one out for ages. I have not been able to find any reference to it anywhere online and so I just threw it out there. Thank you for responding so quickly. While looking for the finder.plist file, I noticed several, the expected one plus 4 or 5 others with alpha numeric extensions. I took the liberty of trashing them as well. Then I noticed that throughout the Library there are plists with alpha numeric extensions in many other categories. Am I safe to delete all with extensions and just keep the expected plists? I assume that they are the result of some form of corruption.

I should have mentioned that I have noticed that almost all these files with alphanumeric extensions after the .plist are categorized as Documents rather than Property Lists, are Zero bytes in size and predate the most recent .plist by several years.

All of this progress and increased level of understanding leads me to what will be the last question about this particular subject! There are a number of folders that appear to have no contents which are named with characters that we do not normally use, “hieroglyphics” style names plus there are a few folders without any name at all, again appearing to have no contents and a few others that have just a single punctuation mark as a name.

Do you think I can get rid of these or am I stepping into dangerous territory?

All these comments apply only to my Preferences folder.

Eau Rouge, I'm blown away by the fact that you not only went through my EtreCheck report in detail, but also wrote such a detailed analysis and reply, so quickly too.

I took this long to respond because I wanted to report substantial progress...........here I am just over 24 hours later very pleased to say that I've done everything you suggested and more.

Key points are:

I activated TRIM and although the performance of my drive is now often "in the green", (a system load of 2 to 3), there are quite a few times where the figure is ten times that. I'll give the whole system a few days, as there may be some search indexing going on.

Free space is a real problem as you and the app have pointed out. The main problem at the moment is that I have thousands of duplicated photos, perhaps 50 GB or even 100 GB. This is probably my biggest headache and is one reason that I have a couple of "duplicate finders" but I am reluctant to use them, especially after doing all the system cleanup yesterday and today. Anyway, that is the subject for another post elsewhere and I will also search the community forum first.

I have got rid of all "system cleaners", in a couple of cases by reinstalling the apps and then using themselves to uninstall. In the case of Cleanmymac2, there were still some remnants which I had to delete manually.

EaseUS, which I had used, or considered? using for data recovery a year ago had online documentation in great detail but nowhere did it clearly explain how to uninstall. I contacted their support who replied saying, "if you can't see it then it is successfully uninstalled". I therefore reinstalled the app, dragged it to the bin, rebooted and went looking. I found one file in MacHD/Library/Extensions and manually deleted.

Avast was a challenge, won't go into the details, same with "cleverfiles".

The EtreCheck app kept flagging com.oracle.java.Java-Updater.plist in Launch Agents but any time I went looking for it, it said the file could not be found. I therefore went through hundreds of files manually and found out what the problem was. The "file" was an alias. Got rid of it manually. A bit strange. Any comments?

All plists with alphanumeric extensions, same with the "hieroglyphics" and other strangely named files. Could not understand what Fuse was by searching the site online, neither could I remember why I downloaded it but I am sure there was a pressing reason at the time. Gone now!

All User Login Items now unchecked, although I may check Mail again.

Once again thank you for all your assistance. My mid-2009 MacBook Pro appreciates it too.

Funnily enough I had forgotten but I do have EtreCheck and I am running it now for a general check. Will post the results.