Your Mac freeware utility belt

If you’re looking for a half dozen good freeware utilities to keep your Mac in tip-top shape, you could do a lot worse than to try the six we’ve hand-picked from the thriftmac utilities section.

Coconut Battery — When your Mac is unplugged, the battery is your lifeline. Here’s a good way to keep track of it.

MenuMeters — Keep an eye on your CPU system load, disk activity, memory and network throughput — all from the menu bar.

Onyx — Almost a utility belt in itself, Onyx does more to keep your Mac humming than you can shake a stick at.

SuperDuper — If you’re going to do a backup, go all the way with a complete — and easy-to-make — copy of what’s on your hard drive.

TinkerTool — There’s a lot more going on under the hood than you might think. Get at system preferences you never dreamed of.

Did we leave anything out? Let us know with a pithy comment.

Posted Friday, January 26, 2007 in

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  1. Mac HelpMate is a really great maintenance tool. It’s not as cool looking as Onyx but it has many more tools.

    http://www.macworkshops.com/machelpmate

    John Jacobs

  2. Uhh. Super Duper is not free even though it is outstanding.

    wmc

  3. As I understand it, SuperDuper is free unless you want to add more functionality. From the website:

    “You can download SuperDuper! v2.1.3 right now and back up and clone your drives for free — forever!

    “Buy now to unlock scheduling, Smart Update (which saves a lot of time), Sandboxes, scripting and more!”

    Mark Rogers

  4. Check this free utility to clean and organize your Desktop:

    CleanDesk
    at

    http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23604

    Michel Potvin

  5. Onyx while nice can cause some really bad things to happen if you use its cache or repair permissions features. These features should only be used for troubleshooting, and only after a backup. Thankfully you list Superduper. That’s my first utility of choice. For more on when and why to use specific utilities, see my FAQ: http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html

    gopher





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