Review: TechTool Pro
by Magnus
Micromat, the makers of TechTool Pro (TTP), says it is “the complete Macintosh problem solving utility”, and that may very well be true. The basic functions of TTP are diagnostics and repair, optimization, data recovery, safety, and the eDrive. If we start at the end, the eDrive is simply a small Mac OS X partition that is created on one of your hard drives, which you can boot from in an emergency or to do some maintenance. It takes up around 4GB of space. You can also boot from the TTP DVD itself and run the tests and optimizations it comes with. In the safety area, TTP saves certain information about your drive and if something goes wrong it can restore it, thereby potentially saving you from a total crash. Data recovery is what it says, different ways that TTP can help you recover data from a disk that doesn’t appear as very healthy. Optimization is arguably the least useful part of TechTool Pro. It defragments your drives but it seems to me Mac OS X does a pretty good job on its own, so I’m not sure TTP adds much value in this area. In Diagnostics and repair, TTP offers a range of tests that checks various parts of your system such as memory, ports, processor, network interfaces, and much more. If you are going to run tests and optimizations with TTP, be prepared for it to take a long time. That’s about the most negative thing I can say about this software. It’s full of useful utilities and it may just save your valuable data one day. TechTool Pro 4, $98, saving your family photos, priceless.
Price: $98
From: MicroMat
Distributor: MicroMat
Web:
Micromat - TechTool Pro 4