Utilities

Activity Monitor in 10.6 showing incorrect total system RAM

After installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, some people may notice that Activity Monitor reports a smaller amount of RAM than what is installed in the system. For instance, my MacBook Pro has 4GB of RAM installed, but Activity Monitor reports that it has 3.75GB in Snow Leopard whereas in Leopard it reported the full 4GB.

According to Apple, this difference is because on these systems the GPU is using shared system RAM as video memory, resulting in a decreased amount being available for the rest of the system. The integrated GeForce 9400M on my system uses up to … Read more

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. 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 fsevents-based file-system managing utilities, graphics and system managing hardware utilities, a few network diagnostics and information utilities, and one system maintenance program.

File-system utilities Yesterday, I outlined some of the benefits of using fsevents utilities … Read more

Track file changes with fseventer and DaemonFS

There are many times when in troubleshooting your Mac, it is useful to see what files on the system are being modified. For instance, if you are having difficulty with some system preferences and know what preference files are being used to store the system settings, you can further troubleshoot the problem by manually editing the files or removing them. The problem with doing this is that sometimes you can't easily find the files that are being modified.

Though you can use the Finder to search for and sort files by modification date, this is only useful for visible … Read more

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.… Read more

Weekly Troubleshooting Utilities Update

Tested: Stellar Phoenix Macintosh Data Recovery

There are a variety of file recovery utilities for the Mac these days, some of which target specific media and file types, and others that are for more general uses. One I have mentioned in the past is Stellar Phoenix's Data Recovery for the Mac. Recently I decided to run the program through some basic tests to see if it performs as expected. The overall verdict is the program is not as stellar as I would have liked.… Read more

Essential freeware applications for Mac troubleshooting

When it comes to troubleshooting the Macintosh, there are many utilities available for getting the job done. Some are cheap and some expensive but for most you will have to shell out a bit of cash for a license. However, there are also some very robust free options out there for troubleshooting software problems to managing hardware issues.… Read more

Weekly Troubleshooting Utilities Update

AppleJack 1.6 is out for Snow Leopard

With Leopard and prior versions of OS X, one of the popular maintenance utilities was AppleJack, which is a free SourceForge project and ran in the Terminal (preferably Single User mode) as an easy-to-access way to run a bout of cleaning functions on the Mac. AppleJack so far has been incompatible with Snow Leopard, but with today's update the Snow Leopard incompatibility has been squashed.… Read more

Update to Apple's MobileMe iDisk App could signal cloud-based iTunes coming soon

In what would have been an otherwise mundane update, Apple has released its MobileMe iDisk App for iOS 4, including support for iPad. The update may also hint at possibilities of a cloud-based iTunes in the works.… Read more