Weekly troubleshooting utilities update
Our Weekly Utilities Update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week.
Our Weekly Utilities Update report is a list of updates for 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 we have updates for popular and free maintenance utilities, along with a file recovery utility for SD cards and a few hardware-based enablers for graphics cards, filesystems, and scanners.
Maintenance
In Maintenance utilities, the makers of Onyx have released updates both for Onyx (free!) as well as its little brother "Maintenance," which have been updated to include a new search update routine (though I cannot find where it is in the program.) Additionally, this update improves the removal of user and Internet caches.
Recovery
The only file recovery software that has been released is SD Card Recovery ($49.95), which supposedly should be able to recover files from formatted or corrupted files from SD cards. Numerous SD card types and memory brands are supported, and the program isolates the source drive so no files can be overwritten during the recovery process.
Hardware and drivers
The utility gfxCardStatus has been updated to include a power-based switching feature so you can run the onboard GPU when using the battery, and switch to the discrete one when running on wall power. Beyond this a few interface tweaks have been added, among other bug fixes and memory leak patches.
VueScan, which allows you to run numerous unsupported scanners in OS X, has been updated with a release that fixes problems with some specific scanner features, such as infrared cleaning if the scanner supports it. Lastly, Tuxera NTFS has been updated to implement some compatibility fixes for its extended attributes support, allowing the software to better integrate NTFS drives with OS X.
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