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 a few Maintenance and hardware management utilities that have been updated, along with a few miscellaneous ones for scanning, synchronizing documents, and changing document permissions.
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 a few Maintenance and hardware management utilities that have been updated, along with a few miscellaneous ones for scanning, synchronizing documents, and changing document permissions.
Maintenance
This week only a couple of maintenance utilities have been updated. MacKeeper has improved stability during the undelete process and fixed problems with errors when scanning for duplicate files. In addition, small tweaks to the UI have been added. MacKeeper is $39.95 shareware, so you can try it in limited form without a license. A free alternative, OnyX, has been updated to version 2.1.5, and improves cache deletion and that for other temporary items, as well as improves the interface to go to a specified panel at launch.
Hardware
The popular defragmentation utility iDefrag (see our review) has been a good solution for people looking to keep their drives running in as optimized a condition as possible. The latest version is a substantial update that fixes rare crashes and problems with journal splitting and boot disk creation failure when running some of the optimization algorithms, as well as addresses odd error warnings from occurring. The latest version also provides small performance enhancements to the disk block viewer.
If you use a number of different printers, especially if your configurations change from location to location, you may use Print Therapy to fix odd problems that can crop up with the OS X printing system. Version 7.0.2 of this shareware utility ($29.95) is a small update that fixes small problems with the permissions fixing routines in the previous version.
Drivers and Other
The popular VueScan scanning software has seen a small update, which adds improved support for editing OCR text files in a word processor. The utility is $39.95 shareware. BatChmod is a GUI front-end for the unix "chmod" command that allows you to change the permissions of files, either one at a time or in groups.
The utility Synchronize Pro X ($99.95) is mainly a synchronizing application, but does include a feature for making bootable backups of OS X system disks, which can be useful for troubleshooting OS installations. The latest version fixes a few minor bugs with warnings about deleting items and slow performance with the "Files to Copy" window.
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