Mac Maintence

[Ian Tucker]

Having had a bad experience with Nortons System Works early this year  
I have wondered about alternatives.    I have noted from various inputs 
that others have also had difficulties.

The March 2004 edition of the English magazine " MACFORMAT"  has an 
article on tests it has run on six disc maintenance Applications and 
Norton's System Works. v.3  has only scored 3 out of 5 ;  Alsoft's Disk 
Warrior 3.5 out of 5 and Micromat's TechTool Pro 4 ;  5 out of 5 (the 
latter does not run well with anything less than a G4).

For those that may be interested,  I thought it might be worth quoting 
from the final summary:-

"In days gone by, the great name of Norton bestrode across the Mac 
utility scene like some ultimate drive-fixing behemoth.  Norton was the 
first and last word in fixing crashed drives, erased files and 
optimising badly fragmented disks.   Sadly, that's no longer the case.  
  Recent hiccups with Norton's transition to OSX have produced software 
that does not always work as intended.   We've received countless 
reports of Norton gobbling up a hard drive when it was supposed to be 
fixing problems.   Here at Macformat we lost a drive of data due to 
Norton's wild antics.   And although the latest version of the package 
has improved somewhat, it's still a shadow of its former self.   In all 
honesty, we don't feel able at the moment to recommend Norton Utilities 
as a main tool in your Mac repair armoury.

Similarly, Alsoft's Disk Warrior used to be the best package for 
bringing a damaged disk back to life.   Sadly, Disk Warrior hasn't 
transferred to Panther without problems.   Alsoft needs to get it 
working better with the new OS and the Company also needs to introduce 
a drive optimiser that used to be bundled with the OS9 version of its 
software.

At the top of the tree for us is the brand new TechTool Pro 4 from 
Micromat.   It's been a long time coming, but well worth the wait.   
The performance is solid and the tools extensive.   It's a worthy 
recipient of our Editor's Choice award.    The optimiser is still very 
slow and we'd like to see this speeded up, but apart from that we 
really liked this package and think it will find favour with the 
majority of Mac owners.   It's a bit expensive (£E112.),  but it really 
does work."

The URL for Tech Tool Pro 4 is  "www.micromat.com" and the package 
incorporates data recovery, SMART monitoring, Cocoa application, Secure 
data wipes, disk optimiser, hardware testing, bootable CD, protection 
files, data recovery and eDrive.



The summary also contains the following:-  " Finally, we would urge you 
to download a copy of OnyX 1.4.   This great little utility is free and 
a very handy tool for keeping your Mac in trim.   We love it and think 
it deserves a place in your Apps folder."

The URL for OnyX is "www.titanium.free.fr".   Its features include 
Finder customisation, Dock feature, Optimise Scripts, Cache purging, 
font smoothing, Debug menu enabler and journaling On/Off.    Some 
members will be aware "Panther" will, if your Mac is configured to be 
switched on in the early hours of the morning, run daily, weekly and 
monthly cron scripts which assist in keeping things running sweetly.   
OnyX's "Optimise" tab enables you to run these scripts whenever you 
wish.

Sorry this is Off Subject, but I would hate others to go through my 
experience

Ian Tucker