-Hi,

Well, you probably opened up a few schools of thought. Personally I use only DW, some folks use both and others refuse to purchase any 3rd party maintenance utility. I've seen DW save folk's bacon many times over. Probably more than TTPro.

Some added info: Here

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-doug

As a certified "belt and suspenders" type, I use both Disk Warrior and TechTool Pro.
If I weren't such a cheapskate, I'd get Drive Genius, too. But as a senior cirtizen on
a fixed income…

An apparently little-known feature of TTP is eDrive. This is a separate bootable
volume on your HD. No, it doesn't require reformatting and repartitioning your HD.
The MicroMat folk did a little software magic. There are two nice things about
an eDrive: It boots days faster than an optical disc, and there's enough space
in that logical volume to add goodies like Disk Warrior. I can do an "eDrive Restart"
to (1) get a fast launch and (2) have access to my two favorite utilities.

Another argument for multiple HD utilities is that they are different. One may fix
a problem that the others can't.

I've got a 4 month old MacBook Pro. How badly do I need one of these programs?

Jason, it isn't age. It's experience. The more experiences your Mac has,
the more things are likely to go dixie. You will soon find that Disk Utility's
repair capabilities are severely limited.

The big three commercial utilities (Disk Warrior, Drive Genius, Tech Tool
Pro) are all highly competent. Each in its own way.

And I'd eschew advice from true believers who tell you to "forget that app
because this app is all I ever needed and all I need is all you need." Sounds
a bit too much like Steve (I know what's good for you) Jobs.

I also keep TinkerTool (free) and TinkerTool System (cheap) handy for
a variety of cleanup/fixup chores. I only use TT to turn invisibles on and
off for a variety of nefarious reasons. I use TTS mostly to clean caches,
trash recalcitrant files, rebuild launch services -- it does LOTS of stuff.

Hope this helps.

Yes, it certainly does Al, and thank you for that. However, may I ask you to indulge me a bit more? I don't really understand all of this.

Reason: never did much of it. I bought my first Mac 6 years ago (17" iMac G4--love it of course) and it's literally been like a rock! I never had any prpblems with it.But about 1-2 years ago I got annoyed with its sluggishness on the web, asked for advice and was pointed in the direction of YASU. My browser is of course snappier, but otherwise I really don't notice.

So with Disk Utility, TinkerToot, Techtool, etc., what do these programs do that I can't do with disk utility? Whatever it is, I know I don't want to take a risk with my Macbook Pro because I really need it to run at maximum eficiency. I just have to start learning about maintenance and would appreciate any advice with what I need to do from here.

Let's see if my limited understanding can be of use.

YASU (Yet Another System Utility) does many of the Unix
cleanup chores that, say Onyx and Macaroni do, plus the
cache and launch services cleanup that TinkerTool System
does. Cache cleanup will hardly ever speed anything up.
The caches are there to speed things up. Wiping Safari's
bookmark icons can speed things up. They're eye candy.
YASU seems to apply a sledgehammer approach. For example
it removes all cookies as opposed to only one or two that
might be messing you up.

Apple's Disk Utility corrects permissions on selected OS
parts and Apple-apps. I don't know where the idea came from
that correcting permissions is a useful general idea. It
also does a very limited job on directory damage. It often
sees problems that it can't fix. It can check the SMART
status of internal drives -- modern HDs check themselves
for incipient hardware failure. I don't bother with DU's
diagnosis/repair capability.

It used to be said that Disk Warrior was a one-trick pony,
that trick being correcting directory errors that can happen
to anyone. It did that trick well, yet I've seen directory
errors that DW couldn't see or fix that TechTool Pro could.
And vice versa. The new DW checks files and folders (As TTP
has always done) and queries a drive's SMART Status.

TechTool Pro does what DW does in terms of directory and
file/folder checks -- a tad differently because different
programmers did the two apps. It also provides a detailed
hardware check similar to, but again different from, the
Apple Hardware Test that is cleverly hidden on your install
disc. It can also let you possibly recover a file you trashed,
not as well as FileSalvage (another tool in my kit). It'll
also defrag an HD -- a feature hardly needed by most folks,
but Leslye's rather intense image processing leads to a mess
that has to be cleaned up every month or so.

I've only read about Drive Genius, but it looks good. My only
concern is that ProSoft's Data Rescue annoyed the naughtyword
out of me. It did not play well with Secure Empty Trash. It
saved files that were supposed to have been "securely" deleted,
cleverly disguised with random-character file names. And they
wouldn't acknowledge that as a problem. They may be better now.

AppleJack is a lovely, free, 10.4 or less Unix app that has
saved my bacon when one of our Macs won't boot from any of the
usual suspects. That's a strong reason to keep me in Tiger.

I hope this helps a little. And that I wasn't too hyperbolic.

Hi -Al,

Pretty thorough explanation on Utilities, but I'm thinking -Richard (OP) might have switched-->PC, or maybe on vacation...

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-doug