Make no mistake—the Mac is a pretty reliable computer. But anything built by human hands is destined to run into some sort of trouble. And when trouble hits your Mac, many of the troubleshooting utilities listed below will leap to your rescue and have your Mac working again in short order. Even better, some of the programs I’ve selected will help you identify trouble spots before they flare up. Finally, I’ve included a few titles aimed at helping you tweak your Mac to run the way you want it to.
Custom installer: Pacifist 2.0
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Under the wrapper Pacifist can tell you what’s inside installer packages and can even install individual package files. |
Device monitor: Peripheral Vision 1.6.3
Cloning utilities: Carbon Copy Cloner 2.3 and SuperDuper 2.1.2
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Bootable backups SuperDuper makes creating a bootable clone of an OS X drive a simple process. |
Tweaking tools: TinkerTool 3.61 and TinkerTool System 1.51
Many utilities for tweaking hidden settings and performing maintenance let you access OS X settings and features that aren’t otherwise easily available. Among these products, TinkerTool 3.61 ( Marcel Bresink )
) and TinkerTool System 1.51 ( ) are my favorites. TinkerTool and TinkerTool System provide access to many secret settings—for the Finder, the Dock, Exposé, system appearances, and much more—as well as scores of system maintenance and customization options. But developer Marcel Bresink has taken much of the risk out of using these utilities by separating safe actions from potentially risky ones. User-level preference settings are available via TinkerTool (which any user can run), whereas system-level and administrative settings and actions are limited to TinkerTool System (which only an administrator can run). (TinkerTool, free; Tinker Tool System, €7; both fromOther top maintenance and troubleshooting tools
AppleJack 1.4.2 ( The Apotek ) can repair your hard drive, repair permissions, delete cache files, and validate preference files; more important, it does all of this via single-user mode at startup, making it available for use even if a problem prevents you from booting into OS X. GrandPerspective 0.95 ( ; free; Eriban ) examines a volume or folder you’ve selected and creates a visual representation of the space each file occupies—letting you easily see what’s taking up most of the space on your hard drive. MemoryStick 1.5 ( ; free; Matt Neuburg ) lets you know if you’re running short on RAM or if you’ve got too many apps open, by displaying your Mac’s memory allocation. Memtest 4.13 ( ; free; Tony Scaminacic ) is just about the best way to diagnose defective RAM, outperforming even Apple’s Hardware Test.
; free;NetRestore 3.2 ( Bombich Software ) has won the hearts of network administrators for its ability to restore a master disk image to target Macs, whether over a local network or the Internet. Pseudo 1.2.3 ( ; $15; Brian Hill ) hasn’t been updated since 2002, but don’t worry—this tool still works great with newer versions of OS X. For the times you need to launch applications as the root user to edit restricted files, Pseudo is the way to go. SMARTReporter 2.1.5 ( ; free; Julian Mayer ) monitors the SMART (for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) status—verified, unknown, or failing—of all supported drives connected to your Mac and alerts you if there’s a problem. A similar utility to GrandPerspective, WhatSize 10.3.9 ( ; free; ID-Design ) scans the selected drive and provides a size-sorted, hierarchical display of its files and folders.
; free;[ Senior Editor Dan Frakes is Macworld ’s Mac Gems columnist as well as the product review editor for Playlist. ]