Keep Your Mac in the Best Shape

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Repair permissions.
  • (7 more, see all...)

Everything needs love an attention, even your computer. If you do not run some maintenance tasks on a weekly basis, you can experience slowdowns or even crashes. But why even do that, when there are a lot of options dealing with these dangers before they appear. iTool is such a program that tries to take care of any system-maintenance problems, and keep your OS X in the best shape possible.

But, with this type of programs, developers always want to charge you lots of money. Yes, they are mainly right, but there are some programs out there that deliver the same power or even more, and they are free. Well, iTool is that kind of free tool that will let you use its powerful, system-maintenance tools without having to pay a single coin for it.

The Looks

iTool comes with a standard interface that looks and 'feels' very good. Let’s face it, who needs a complicated interface for a system-maintenance piece of software? iTool has eight powerful tools under its hood that can be used separately or all at once. You must decide upon the importance of each and every one of them. All the tools are situated in the right panel, and the various options that the tools provide are available in the left panel.

The Works

When it comes to usefulness, a system-maintenance tool must be in the top. iTool does that very easily, by giving you a big set of tools that will help you overcome the bad sectors, system crashes and other nasty things that can happen when using your Mac. These are the eight tools contained in iTool: Automate, Internet, Clean, Restore, Trash tools, Preferences check, SMART check and the Console.

Automate will let you do a lot of things, like running some periodic maintenance scripts, some rebuilding tasks or some cleaning tasks, at you own leisure. From my experience with them, they worked perfectly, and you should use them, as these things become a security issue and also tend to slow down your Mac. There is also an option available that will let you shut down the program or your Mac, so you can just let the program do the maintenance work and just go and solve your problems, iTool will take care of your computer.

If you want to clear you Internet traffic, you should use the Internet tool. You can clear the history, empty the cache, remove cookies and downloads of various web browsers, like Safari, Camino and, of course, Firefox. But there are some Safari-only options, like emptying Safari top sites and the research. This Internet tool is pretty useful, if you need to quickly remove all the Internet traces left by your browsers.

The Clean tool goes even further, cleaning some less useful things, like the System Logs and the Reporter Logs. If something goes wrong and you delete something you don’t want to, you can surely use the restore tool to rebuild indexes to some main applications included in OS X, like Mail, Spotlight, the Helper Viewer and even the Finder.

The Trash tools can be used for secure data removal, and will also delete files that just give errors when trying to delete them. This is done by the secure empty-trash option. You can also run a Preference check to find out if some system or user preferences are corrupted and refuse to work how they should.

The SMART check tool is the one that you need to employ to find errors on your Mac and try to repair them. You can use the included Console to read the report and log files that are created by your computer when employing it. Some actions can also be performed from the Finder, so that you can create a RAM Disk or a private folder right from the iToolBox panel from the program.

But the cool part is that you can also access some tweaking features from the Tweak panel. Thus, you can tweak the Dock, Dashboard, Finder, Safari, Spotlight and Stacks with ease, in just a couple of seconds. You can also restart the Dock or the Finder from the Commands panel, if things go wrong. So, as you can see, there is a big amount of tools that is ready to be used by you and make your Mac run as if it was new, again.


The Good

iTool is free, easy to use, has a nice interface and lets you perform a complete system maintenance in just a couple of minutes. The menus are intuitive, and all the software repair that you want to do on your Mac can be done by this solution.

The Bad

If we were to mention something bad, we would tell you that the program could have used some more tools to see to the stability of the system. Also, some browsers like Opera are still left unsupported.

The Truth

iTool is one of the most advanced system-maintenance tools available for Mac, and it’s free. There are no known problems with it, so it works like a charm. All you need is the time to download and use it. After that, most of the problems with your Mac are history. Just try it and see!

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 5
features 5
ease of use 4
pricing / value 5


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent
 
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