"configuring OS X and OS X applications using hidden preference settings to fine tune your use of applications and the OS itself."
What does this mean? never heard of hidden preferences.
There are over 1,000 preferences for OS X and OS X applications such as Finder, Mail, Safari, AddressBook, Disk Utility, and some 28 other Apple and common third party applications that are not accessible through the Preferencee settings in the GUI Because they are not available through the Preferences GUI in the applications they are called
hidden preferences. They are not
secret because they are available to anyone willing to spend the time to dig through thousands of pages of developeer documentation to ferret them out. The developer's of MacPilot have done this however, and present them in a single application.
So the more expensive system 2 does not have Tinker Tool regular on it?? odd no? Boy, it's got so much on it though.
As I said there is no overlap between TinkerTool and TinkerTool System, but if you have TinkerTool installed on your system — it is after all free — TinkerTool System can import the TinkerTool configuration panes into its GUI.
Do you really need to monitor drive health?
In my experience the most common system failure in Macs or PCs is hard drive failure, and it seems HD failure is becoming more common. Monitoring volume and drive health can provide early warning of impending failure and allow you to take appropriate action to repair volume structure damage, or move the data off of a failing drive
before it fails completely and the data is unrecoverable. Just last week DG a;erted a friend his drive was failing and he was able to get his most critical data off of the drive before it failed totally. My experience is the failure rate of hard drives is three to four times that of other hardware components. So I will leave it up to you whether monitoring volume structure and drive health is worthwhile. I think it is.
As a side note, my experience and that of an extensive test by Google Labs is the S.M.A.R.T. values touted by manufacturers and used by all sorts of different utilities is a good indicator that a drive
has already failed and you just don't know it yet, but a poor predictor of impending failure. TechTool Pro provides more data on S.M.A.R.T. results than any other utility I am aware of and is therefore better at predicting drive failure than the summary reported by Disk Utility, Diskwarrior, OnyX, and numerous other utilities. The best predictor of impending drive failure is a surface scan which typically takes several hours to complete. Either TechTool Pro or Drive Genius can perform a surface scan, but it is not part of either utility's monitoring utility.
H - I agree, I would love to know how Tinker Tool system 2 did what Cocktail could not. (remember, the owner of the software in question -- extremely smart developer) -- did not know.
Comparing the logs or perhaps the documentation of the various utilities should reveal this answer.
