Many Mac owners are rather relaxed about system maintenance, believing that OS X does everything on their behalf. The truth is, every system needs some degree of maintenance, and Cocktail offers a mixture of powerful features that you might not know you need.

The application can clear Spotlight indexes, empty a troublesome Trash can, interact with Time Machine and turn off those irritating Notification Center updates. Cocktail can also delete language files that simply take up space.

Pro users and novices will both find value from the software, since it offers local and network configuration alongside convenient switches that are not normally accessible. Want to switch off the startup chime? Now you can.

Cocktail also offers system cleaning and optimisation, an important feature on the Mac. As well as a one-click optimisation setting, it enables you to choose which caches and log files to keep.

Other benefits include:

• Permissions management - essential on the Mac, since permissions lie at the heart of many system problems.
• Control of browser caches, cookies, download lists and data saved in forms.
• Cleaning of swap files and other items that claim disk space.
• Management of items that are locked or somehow inaccessible to the user.
• Controls to switch the startup mode.

Until it's registered, Cocktail is good for 10 uses on Mavericks, Lion and Snow Leaopard. After that, you'll beed to buy a licence. Note that older versions of Cocktail for Leopard and Tiger are freeware.