Apple provides most of the tools we need to keep our Macs in tip top shape. Disk Utility can check and repair your disk drive, and repair permissions.
Your Mac automatically cleans various system and application caches. You can maintain your Mac’s health the Apple way—simple and easy—or add an eye candy app and feel better about checking things under the hood that you didn’t know exist.
Easy And Thorough Eye Candy
I’m calling CheckUp eye candy because it’s one of the most attractive Mac apps you’ll ever see. It smacks of 21st century technology sizzle. CheckUp must be a good app to have because it looks so good.
CheckUp’s main feature is a “stunning user interface.”
Think of CheckUp as the Mac’s cockpit controls, complete with dials, and buttons, and options, and graphs. Who can resist a complete profile of the Mac and a display of all the most important information.
There’s an icon to tell you that your Mac has an Intel chip inside, whether or not you’re using Leopard or Snow Leopard, and whether your Mac is 64-bit or 32-bit capable. You’ll learn how many USB and FireWire ports are on your Mac, as well as the RAM and CPU details.
CheckUp gives you a Mac Profile, but also System details, Processor and Memory details, as well as information on your Mac’s connected disks, your network, and what processes are running.
The System setting includes how many apps and fonts and drivers and plugins and Widgets you have on your Mac, where they are, details on each.
The real eye candy comes in the Processors, Memory, and Disks tabs.
For example, on dual core CPUs you can view graph data for each CPU, click to Optimize performance, click to Export graph data (because your friends will want to know), and view your Mac’s temperature, Bus speed, and CPU type.
Of the top six Main Features for CheckUp, #1 and #6 are “stunning user interface,” and “beautiful graphs,” respectively.
There is an integrated tool to remove file duplicates on your Mac, another to uninstall applications, one to detect RAM and hard disk drive failures, and what Mac users have clamored for since OS X was launched in 2001—automatic detection of 20 common Mac issues.
What are they? I’m not sure.
The CheckUp site doesn’t list them, and I didn’t count the functions on the app. The eye candy is so alluring as to inhibit thinking.
Most of what you see in CheckUp is a visual, real time display of your Mac—RAM, disks, network connection, installed apps and Widgets, disk usage, and a list of running processes—pretty much all the same information you can get from opening Activity Monitor on your Mac.
Apple gives good eye candy but not as good as CheckUp. In the final analysis, does a Mac user need CheckUp? It’s not inexpensive, though you could spend more money for a collection of Mac apps which do some of what CheckUp does.
So, it depends. If you want ease of use, peace of mind, and a central location to check on various Mac functions and invoke a few features, CheckUp will do that and look pretty. There are free alternative apps that do the same things but require more effort on your part.
About Ron McElfresh
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