Micromat TechTool Pro 4 (Mac)
by Micromat
|
List Price: Category: Software See more product details and other editions |
|---|
(Click here)
Software Reviews of Micromat TechTool Pro 4 (Mac)
Customer Review: Good Program Has Quirk
Summary: 4 Stars
Tech Tool Pro is an excellent disk utility program for Mac users that provides essential tools to keep your hard drives working in optimum condition. It also allows you to maintain and optimize your drives to keep them running smooth. Additionally, it can alert you of drive failures and problems before they strike thus making data loss less likely with advanced warnings. When compared with other Mac disk utility programs on the market, I would say that Tech Tool Pro is definitely preferred over anything produced by Norton. Granted, I have never used Norton on a Mac but I have used it on Windows PC machines and let's just say that my experience with the Windows version was more than enough to steer me clear of trying their Mac version. Tech Tool Pro seems to me to be more stable and reliable than Norton, and I would assume that applies to the Mac version as well.
I first started using this program with OS X Panther and applied the necessary patches released by Micromat when I migrated my system to OS X Tiger. Most of the features worked in Tech Tool Pro but one feature that ceased to work correctly was the "eDrive". This is an emergency bootable partition that Tech Tool will create and boot from to allow you to run repair operations to your start up volume. After applying all of the patches to Tech Tool Pro to make it compatible with Tiger I started having problems with the functionality of the eDrive. I had to spend a lot of time working on this and spent some frustrating moments trying to resolve the problem. For some reason Tech Tool Pro could not properly create the eDrive under Tiger and when I tried to create it it would freeze my system and would not boot up.
I eventually had to resolve the problem by manually creating the eDrive on a firewire hard drive and now all is working normally. Micromat tech support was very helpful and responsive, although they could not resolve the problem to create the eDrive partition from within the program. They did provide me detailed step by step instructions on how to work around this and set up the eDrive manually which is working perfectly now. All in all, this is a good program but it obviously has some issues with Tiger that relates to the eDrive functionality. Hopefully, this type of problem will be eventually resolved but at least there is a simple work around should you encounter the same problem. It appears that not everyone has this problem and my problem may have been related to something getting corrupted in the move from Panther to Tiger; who knows. Despite this one minor glitch, I can heartily recommend this program as one that every Mac user should have at his disposal along with Disk Warrior. I was very impressed with Micromat and their level of support and professionalism. This is a product worth having.
Customer Review: Awesome disk utility!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been using Macs for 6 years and I received TechTool Pro as a birthday present. It is much better then Norton Utilities for Mac, mainly because TechTool Pro allows you to make what Micromat calls an eDrive, which is a nice touch that doesn't destroy your current partition and allows you to boot into the version of OS X that you have installed with a copy of TechTool Pro to allow you to optimize your hard disk without having to use the bootable CD-ROM. I have Mac OS X Panther 10.3.9 on my iMac and I found out that my hard disk was fragmented so I ran TechTool Pro and it now runs faster.Customer Review: Really - Quite Good!
Summary: 4 Stars
I've been using TechTools utilities (including Drive 10) for years. I have always found TechTools to be a great utility product for the Mac. TechTools Pro 4 (4.0.6) meets that standard. Easy to use, a beautify interface, and fast. It was fab for routine maintenance including opt-ing drives. The eDrive (which is a relatively new feature) was a bit confusing, but once I ogt a handle on its function and purpose, it was a breeze. Since I have a small hard drive (only 40 G), I elected to install the eDrive on a separate USB Iomega mini-drive. It worked great and I feel comfortable with the fact that I have a separate start up drive when the ultimate harm (a crashed drive) strikes.
To conclude, I would recommend this product.
Customer Review: Not Ready For Prime Time
Summary: 1 Stars
Completely hosed the 250 GB HD on my new 20" iMac. Drive had to be replaced by Apple.
Takes forever to boot from the CD and the fan operates at an extremely high rate. Tests seem to take forever to run and resulted in a drive that wouldn't mount and couldn't be reformatted, S.M.A.R.T. reported the drive damaged.
It is a shame as I have used the product in the past and found it to effective and reliable.
Currently, I am using Prosoft's Drive Genius which has fewer features, but seems much more reliable.
Customer Review: Steer clear
Summary: 1 Stars
I wish I had read these reviews before buying Techtool Pro. It seems rather like a defective product. I had a drive that wouldn't mount, and TTP recognized it, and acted like it could recover it, but when I switched from "Drive" mode to "Volume" mode, the drive was no longer visible to the software, so it wouldn't perform any tests.
(In Drive mode, the problem drive passed all the hardware tests multiple times)
I executed the data recovery routine (which took literally all night to run on my 40GB drive, and it found 700+ arbitrary recoverable files from the thousands I had on the drive. It didn't retain the filenames, so it was a crapshoot when recovering any of them (most were superfluous utilities and Word docs, rather than my important files).
If you have a defective drive, put your money toward a new drive, rather than this gamble.