I recently installed Onyx, Preferential Treatment, and Disk Warrior. Are these utilities useful for "modern" Macs? Any thoughts on my comments below?
Onyx was recommended in an Apple discussion group as a plist checker. it doesn't do that as an obvious option, so may have been wrongly suggested. To my untutored mind Onyx just seems to wrap standard Apple iMac utilities in a pretty package. Nice, particularly at $0, but not an essential tool. Preferential Treatment was later located in a WAMUG posting as a plist checker. It appears to work (all OK!). If trustworthy it will be worth the $0 paid! I had been troubled with the common WAMUG advice to "delete the preference file" when strange things happened with an application. Not an elegant way to track a fault. Disk Warrior may be like those regular backups - hope we never have to use it! (Q1) Disk Warrior recommends a monthly preventative maintenance routine to rebuild the disk Directory. Is this done by WAMUG members? Or is it a case of "don't touch if its not broken"? (Q2) D.W. seems to run three tests - Directory, Files and Hardware. I used D.W. with 2 Firewire HD and 1 USB HD connected. Directory and Files could be run on any hard drive, but only the Macintosh HD was selectable for the Hardware test. Is this normal? (Q3) I only ran D.W. tests on the USB hard drive and was left with the feeling "is that all there is?" I was expecting a rigorous Read/Write hammering of the drive, or at least a "bad sector" test. Is Disk Warrior value for money ($160) or is the standard Apple Disk Utility the more appropriate tester? Regards, Alan Alan Smith iMac 21.5" Intel Core 2 Duo 3.06GHz 4M : OSX 10.6.7 iPad2; ATV2 -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
