The Company Micromat has what is apparently the only hardware and software testing utility for the Mac running OS X Leopard. I just got a copy of the latest version. This is one of those apps I've bought about three times, where the previous versions tended never to do a good enough job of diagnosing and maintaining my system.

Of all the crappy versions, I'd have to say "Drive 10" was probably the worst. It had the stripes and candy buttons of Aqua for OS X 10.1-2, but it sat there looking pretty and convincing me it was doing nothing but advancing some mysterious progress bar.

Apple Inc supplies TechTool with its AppleCare program. So they must trust it to do what it says.

And yet, I run the app from the DVD right out of the box, boot my system with it, and it hangs up on two of the tests on a particular drive (the drive, coincidentally, I use for Time Machine).

And when I say hang, let me also point out that there is a "stop" button for any test. I clicked the appropriate buttons when the tests had obviously stalled. Nothing happened. There is no option to kill any process or force-quit apps while booted from the CD. And so I had to hard-restart by holding down the power button. Not a great way to start off with a "Pro" Mac utility.

The hardware test suites went off without a hitch, but I had errors in file structure and Finder info on one drive. I had "Repair On" checked... and yet no repairs occurred.

And note: when you boot into the CD, the interface is mind metal, not Leotard grey-dations. Meaning the OS on the DVD is not current with Leopard, which is the system you'd be diagnosing.

There is a "Performance" section that allows you to defrag drives. I'm going to see if I can fix these File Structure and Finder errors, then see how painful that process might be.

Back in the day, I used to be a meticulous drive optimizer. It was part of my normal maintenance routine. In the OS X era, I was told: young fool, you don't need to do that anymore! OS X is fast, ultra-modern, and stable! All that drive optimizing stuff is no longer necessary! Uh, OK, except I frequently notice serious lapses in performance while running the Mac OS.

More to follow...

You can not be serious. One thing I have always stressed is the less you tinker with the system the better off you will be. You just set up a fresh clean system and you are already installing crap like cocktail. Techtool is for when you have a serious problem go down. Not to tinker with the system. Plus as a Pro what are you using TimeMachine as your back up strategy. I should have said something immediately. For the mom and pop machine at home sure use TimeMachine but to be backing up your business using Timemachine just sounds like a recipe for eventually crying the aqua blues.

Stop the insanity.

No, I know. That's the OS X party line. Leave it alone and everything will be OK. I understand that. Except there are times when everything ISN'T OK. Hard drives get single-bit errors in volume headers, drives get fragged to the point where performance degrades while you are working with a heavily fragmented file. And sometimes you just want to know if things are all in your head, or if say your RAM chips are bad. You need some kind of testing utility. That's why we have Drive Utility.

But Apple also gives us TechTool. They don't say not to use it.

No, actually Time Machine has been pretty good. You haven't tried it, so trust me. Except for the goofy space-background and animation, it actually has a pretty intelligent interface. What it does, is take any Finder or app window (like Mail) you are working with, and roll back the clock to a previous state, and lets you restore files. I've already used it. Painless.

I mistakenly deleted a ton of emails from one of my mailboxes. I went back to the day before, and there they were. I restored them, and they appear in the present in a folder "Restored." Not too shabby.

Theoretically, if it's your HARD DRIVE window that's in Time Machine, you can restore the whole thing, in the event of catastrophic failure. I kind of like that safety net.

Remember, I give everything a chance. If Time Machine lets me down, fuck it. But so far so good. And even though it has irritating animated transitions, at least they are grounded in what the program is theoretically doing, shuffling back through a stack of past computer states.

Oh P.S., by the way I've tried plenty of other backup utilities, and they were all horrible. This one fits with my style--by that I mean lazy--where I don't have to sit and change disks or nursemaid. And I also do (or will do) periodic whole-drive backups of the job files as a redundancy, and keep that in the safe.

And get this, surprisingly enough, I was working when I saw Time machine kick in... and didn't really notice anything more than a minimal slowdown. It wasn't too bad. I heard the drive cranking away, but I was able to keep going.

I also had a day relatively free from the typing bug. I'm trying to think why... oh yeah, I restarted after installing something.

I checked my disks for fragmentation, and they are nowhere NEAR ready to take any kind of action. Only about 168 files fragmented. That's like a jillionth of a percent. Meanwhile, I know that my Mac woes aren't hardware. Memory is check, video and all the buses check out. The keyboard isn't a USB thing, that's fine.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: thalo,

I am glad to hear TimeMachine is working. I am horrible at backing up. I just keep getting bigger drives when I run out of space. I periodically do back up to DVD but not often enough for sure.

I have DiskWarrior and Techtool. When ever I have had a major catastrophe it has usually taken both to get me going again. Having your system set up like the way it is now will keep fragmentation down. I don't think I have ever defragged a single drive since using Mac OS X. That includes all the machines in the office. I have not upgraded either Diskwarrior or Techtool since getting Leopold. I don't think I have upgraded either since like 2004 possibly 2003. Whenever Techtool finally had a version that worked in Mac OS X. I had bought the Legacy version because they were offering a free upgrade disk to the Mac OS X version. Somehow I put the wrong address when I registered. They sent me multiple disk that never arrived until I figured out what I had done.

Just had a typing beachball. Net related.

The only time I have typing problems involve the net. Did you ever try installing the Universal Binary version of the Flash plugin? I can not hurt to try it. It might work better on the G5.

I just thought of something for the typing beachball. Do you have any fonts in your User:thalo:Library:Font folder. If so remove them. There shouldn't be any need for any fonts in that folder.

Good idea. There were a lot of fonts in there, installed by OS X and various apps, like ComicLife, which has its own fonts.

I moved them all into the main Library Font directory: /Library/Fonts

It's not a typing beachball, by the way... it's just a weird bug where the keyboard becomes unresponsive. For example you'll hit the spacebar, but a space won't type, so you hit it again. And typing is slower. But it doesn't beachball. I've read in Apple delusions people having the exact same problem in laptops. So far, though, I'm the only one I know of to experience it in a desktop. I'm using a brand-new slim aluminum keyboard. Wired. With an Apple Pro Mouse (not Mighty Mouse) attached.

I'm am not sure if moving them to the Library:Fonts folder was the best thing. I might have moved them to the trash to delete them. Or to a folder on the desktop temporarily.

Where there any duplicates moving them into the Library:Fonts folder?

A couple of duplicates. But many not... every software program that installed fonts, installed them in my user library. I did first move them to a folder on the Desktop. I'm not going to trash them. Some of them I didn't have in my friggin' "vault", that was my only copy of some fonts.

Right after I moved them, I got the compressed font bug. Which I haven't seen since Panther. This is not the same as the scrambled font bug, where the characters are screwy. This one it's the LETTER SPACES go haywire, and compress each word of text (in a web page or html email, or anywhere)... into a solid black mass only three or four characters wide. So when you see some text it looks like the CIA went after it with a black magic marker, censoring it. Cured by restarting. I swear, if I didn't restart this machine frequently--more frequently than I ever restarted my legacy machine--it would be a total mess.

Today the big Hitachis came, and I have them in now. Very painless pulling drives in and out of the enclosure... except that I have it on top of the radiator, and so the handle is in the way pulling out the bottom drawer. I have to tilt it up, or turn it to one side. I might just run the enclosure up to desk level, that might be easier. It's got a fan, but it's fairly quiet. And pretty soon, it's going to move when the Radiator becomes a server.

It's amazing to look at a drive and see crap like: SEVEN HUNDRED GIGABYTES available. That's sweet. I'm just using these in the same capacity as I was with the 500s, one for job storage (really everything storage), and one for Time Machine. Time Machine will eventually fill UP the drive, and then simply delete the oldest states as it keeps incrementally adding new ones.