CheckIt 2 Performance Suite

Reviewed by Ted Bade

$99.99 USD

System Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or Newer (A few features of Spring Cleaning requires 10.5.x or newer) CheckIt is Leopard compatible TechTool Platinum 4.6.2 DVD install includes a disk image of version 4.1.1 for Mac OS 10.3.9 compatibility. DVD drive is required to install TechTool Platinum.

Strengths: Great collection of very useful applications. Easy access to a wide variety of useful maintenance, testing, and repair routines. Good price savings on the package.

Weaknesses: No upgrade path for Tech Tools. Some of the included features are built into MacOS X. If you already have means of accessing them, some of this stuff might be unnecessary. The backup program is really unnecessary for Leopard users who use Time Machine.

Previous Reviews: MacC review of SpringCleaning version 8

For a demo of this product.

CheckIt 2 for the Mac from Smith Micro Software is the ultimate clean up your Mac product package. It contains versions several different applications that can be used to clean up, repair, and optimize your Mac in a package deal that won’t clean out your bank account. If you don’t already own most of the products in this package, you should really take a good look at the CheckIt 2 package. It should be on every Mac owners list of important applications.

Included in this package are:

1. Tech Tools Platinum - 4.6.2

2. Spring Cleaning - version 10

3. Executive Sync

4. Retrospect Express

5. Stuffit Standard 2009

Each one of these applications are worthy of a full review of features and abilities. For this review we will stick with the basics. Le me just say that each of these programs performs as expected and are good if not the best applications to help you maintain a healthy Mac.

Smith Micro includes it’s own Mac OS X utility program, Spring Cleaning, as the core of this utility package. This application offers some useful features to help the user locate and resolve a variety of file related issues on the Mac. While a number of these features are things an honest Mac geek can do with terminal or some basic scripting, having them all available at the simple click of a mouse and easily automated is valuable for any user.

Spring Cleaning includes Clean up functions that can be used to clean up and maintain a Mac system. You will find utilities that enhance search features, locate a certain file types such as Disk images, empty folders, Language files, Fonts files, and so forth so that you can choose to delete or archive them to create space on your drive (and perhaps speed yur Mac up a bit). It can also locate images, music, podcasts hidden throughout your disk and easily place them in the directories of the proper “iApplication” (iPhoto, iMovie, and iTunes). If you have moved to the Intel realm of Macs, The Universal Application Finder can be used to locate universal applications and strip the unneeded PowerPC code parts from them. This function also will search for non-Intel-native applications, a great way to locate all those applications that really need to be updated!

Other clean up functions include a MacUninstaller. This gem will locate all the files associated with an application you no longer need, so that you can trash them. It can even go as far as locating the files associated with the application. Mail Cleaner will take a look at attachment files associated with several different email programs and let you archive or delete unwanted items to save space. Internet File Finder does this for different web browsers cleaning up caches, cookies, and history files. The advantage of this function is that it will do this to all web browsers on your Mac at the same time. There are also some other functions designed to search for files of a specific type with the intention of removing or archiving them to save hard drive space.

The other main aspect of Spring Cleaning is some drive maintenance features. Broken alias fixer finds and helps you locate orphaned alias files and either repair or delete them. File checker checks files and package files for damage. If it finds any damage you can either choose to replace or delete the file. House Keeping scripts give you the ability to run the daily, weekly, monthly Unix maintenance scripts that help keep a Unix based machine running well. Which goes along with Permission fixer, which can be used to fix Unix file permissions and Cache cleaner which is used to delete system cache files. Secure deletes free space and will overwrite erased data one, seven, or 35 times to completely eliminate any data that was there.

Spring Cleaning comes with other features that are used to modify and limit how the other features work, allowing you to choose areas or files that you don’t want it to include. Finally, and very importantly, is the ability to schedule any or all of these functions to be performed automatically. For instance, it is probably a good idea to repair disk permissions once a month, and it is a good idea to allow the Unix maintenance routines to run. Using Spring Cleaning, you can easily set these up to automatically run when it works for your schedule.

Besides Spring Cleaning’s built in features Version 10 includes System Snapshot, a neat utility that allows you create a snapshot of your Mac’s file structure, then later after you install something, compare what changed to this snapshot. This information can help you quickly resolve issues if they occur after installing some piece of software. Quick compare give one the ability to quickly compare two files or folders as well as to sync the two folders. Photo A.K.A. is a program designed to manipulate folders of images. It can automatically rename groups of images, and lets you move the group to other places like iPhoto, email, Flickr, and more. It can automate the process, so if you do a lot of standard renaming and moving of images, a program like this can take over a lot of the work.

Although Spring Cleaning has some basic disk repair features, there is nothing like a really powerful hardware and drive repair program. The Checkit2 package includes version 4.6.2 of TechTools Platinum.

In my opinion, TechTools is probably the best all around hardware and system checking and repair program. It not only includes a variety of functions to check all aspects of your hard drives and all the problems that can occur with them, but also includes ways to check various hardware aspects of your Macintosh system.

Here is a brief overview of most of the features included in Tech Tools. It can test many hardware aspects of your Macintosh including: hardware caches, memory, network, processor, and firewire/USB ports. It can also test the hardware aspects of your drives, that is the disk controllers, drive read/write functions, scan hard drive surfaces for defects, and test the drives SMART performance (SMART is a drive reliability feature added to modern hard drives). Then, as expected, it can check the hard drive volume structures and test files for issues. While all this fits nicely in a short paragraph, it can be a life saver when you need to repair a failing Mac.

TechTools can improve drive performance by inspecting file directories and reorganizing them to optimize performance. A set of tools adds even more abilities to this program. eDrive allows one to create a partition on your drive which includes a bootable system as well as a copy of TechTools. This is invaluable when your system eventually crashes. For when this happens, you will be able to boot off this partitions and run TechTool’s repair features to the ailing drive. Since this is done on a hard drive, it boots and operates a lot faster then the one that comes on a DVD.

Data recovery is an function that allows one to recover valuable data from a damaged volume. It can work alone. However, TechTools includes a function that creates a copy of your volume’s directory. If you turn this protection on, when volume information is damaged, files will more easily be recovered.

Wipe data is another way to erase data. While most applications that do this write zeros over the data image (called zeroing the data), it has been found that high tech recover programs can find ghost image of the data that was there before it was zeroed. TechTools includes a random ASCII garbage write. Instead of zeroing the data, it writes random ASCII data on top of the data begin erased. This makes it even harder for erase data to be recovered.

Other tools include a means of testing the Audio and video features of the Macintosh and to easily turn on and off Journaling on the hard drive. (If you use a drive for only video files, Journaling might slow things down a bit).

Finally, the program includes several ways to set up automatic checking and reporting on issues found. If it is critical that your data be kept safe, then running checks regularly and automatically can be a real benefit.

There is a lot to this application. it is a terrific program and should be on every users Mac. If you use it regularly, problems can be found and resolved before time and data are lost. No one wants to spend their weekend trying to recover a failed drive or volume. Using TechTools can reduce this possibility and it will help repair things if they go amiss. TechTools is on the top of my list for most important recover application.

The only bad news about this version of TechTools is that there is no upgrade path to the current version of Tech Tools. However, The included version works with the current MacOS and Macintosh hardware.

Executive Sync is a pretty powerful application for the professional (or in my case Mac junkie), who wants to make sure all the critical files are on both the desktop and portable Mac. it is intelligent, in that it allows the user to control the direction of the sync. You can sync from one machine to another or both ways (remote to local or local to remote), keeping the most recent file in both locations.

Executive sync can use a variety of methods to automatically determine which of two files (on the remote or local Mac) are the most recent. It actually creates a database of the folders you are syncing and uses this along with other data to determine which files need to be moved. In theory, you should be able to start a project on the desktop, sync to your MacBook, go on the road and work on the project, come home and continue with the project on the desktop, using Executive sync to make sure the latest files are moved to the machine you are currently working on.

This application goes beyond simply checking date modified. It uses a feature called TAS (Time and State), to use checksum data to determine if a file was modified. A real valuable program for anyone who regularly uses two machines and wants to be sure the data is properly synchronized.

If you don’t run Leopard and Apple’s time machine, you might be happy to know that the Checkit2 Suite includes Retrospect Express version 6. This program can help you automatically back up data one your machine to be sure nothing important is lost when a drive fails.

Retrospect Express is a robust program that has been around for quite a while. It is a great way to back up your important files.

Finally, this package includes the current (2009) version of Stuffit Standard. This is the bread and butter file compression program for the Macintosh. It can be used to decompress any type of file compression and includes the ability to compress files. The copy I got didn’t come with a serial number for Stuffit Standard, but Smith Micro people told me this is an oversight and they are working on remedying the situation.

Overall this package includes a tremendous amount of power. With this suite you can repair, maintain, cleanup, sync, backup, and deal with your files in many different ways. The cost of this package is very reasonable, considering all the programs you get. I don’t think any Macintosh user could go wrong by buying this suite. I do think a lot of people could do a lot for good for their machine by buying and using the applications in CheckIt2! Definitely, run out and buy this application now. (Your Mac will be happy you did. ☺)