Weekly Troubleshooting Utilities Update

Our Weekly Utilities Update report is a list of all the updates for many Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though utilities can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems.

This week there are updates fro file management utilities targeted at sizing files on the filesystem and also managing duplicate files. In addition display resolution utilities have been updated along with enterprise-level networking utilities, and finally a number of updates for maintenance and cleaning utilities are available.

File Management

We recently wrote an article on managing duplicates in iTunes libraries after migrating data from another system, and the utility DupeGuru ($19.95) may be able to help in similar situations to find similar files even though names are different. This week it was updated to version 2.10.1 to fix a few crashes users were experiencing. In addition, the popular file sizing utility WhatSize ($12.99) has been updated to address application licensing issues and slow performance when searching for large duplicate files.

Hardware and Networking

If you need to use nonstandard resolutions and other settings for displays attached to your system, DisplayMaestro ($4.95) should be able to help. The program has been updated to add new settings storage options and clarification notes on changing the color bit-depth of the display.

For networking utilities, InterMapper and it's corresponding "Remote Access" utility have been updated with numerous bug fixes to address crashes, memory leaks, and incorrect status reporting among other small bugs. The program is an enterprise-level network troubleshooting utility and at $495 for the main program and $245 for the remote access utility it is not targeted for home users.

Maintenance

If you missed our earlier announcement, this week we saw a full update to AppleJack (Free!) which will now work on Snow Leopard machines. This utility is a quick way to launch into the Single-User diagnostics mode in OS X, and quickly run some cleaning and maintenance operations in OS X. Other maintenance-based updates are for MacCleanse ($19.95) which fixes a folder wiping issue when running in superuser mode (this is a recommended update to avoid this issue). MacKeeper ($39.95) has also been updated, which tweaks the user interface and brings back the missing tutorial buttons, as well as adds a few new features to the Data Encryptor and Update Tracker features.

Lastly, the boot disk creation utility DasBoot (Free!) has been updated to work on Snow Leopard and support the latest Apple hardware. This utility is good for creating diagnostics drives with iPods and other external drives from boot CDs that come with various utility packages.

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