Customer Reviews

Micromat TechTool Pro 4.6.1 Diagnostic Utility Macintosh Universal DVD UPGRADE

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I recommend this product for optimizing any drive and volume structure repairs and much more in conjunction with Disk Warrior for maintaining and repairing the directory and Drive Genius for a complete device (drive) backup. This is a multi-architecture DVD version. It will allow use on all Macs, not just Intel based. I purchased this before my intended macbookpro order. Have not used on Intel based Mac yet. I use it for its improved optimization features mainly.

Lots of great features for testing and maintaining optimized drives. THE ONLY CHOICE for optimization in my opinion. Always backup first. The boot partition feature is a nice feature but I highly recommend using a LaCie or other trusted external drive to boot from and do maintenance. It's just easier, faster, and safer. Not to mention an uninterrupted work flow if you still want to do a few things on your Mac while this process is running.
Before Tiger, I was using Disk Warrior optimization which was a forced thorough but extremely safe optimization. Since Tiger indexing no longer permitted Disk Warrior optimization I moved on to TechTool Pro 4.04. It was great on external drives, but unfortunately not as thorough in pre-optimization scanning as Disk Warrior. I had developed bad blocks on my PowerBook G4 1g 60g drive. So after optimization, it wouldn't boot. Terrifying at the time, I was able to recover almost everything. After Apple sent a replacement hard drive (in warranty replacement 5400rpm) I swapped it for a 7200rpm drive and used the apple drive as a backup in a firewire external enclosure using Drive genius to duplicate the drive. (NEVER USE drive genius for optimization of boot drive, drive will not boot after optimizing) Drive Genius does a great job of volume and device copy or cloning. It is not bad for creating and moving partitions without erasing existing partitions.

Don't use for optimization. Dangerous. Prosoft Data backup provides the best backup/optimization solution. You can optimize and backup at the same time in far less time. Instead of the longer process of moving data around on one drive, copy it to a blank, or reformatted drive. Boot from the other drive and repeat the reformat of your original and start the clone process. You now have a backup and an optimized main drive, awesome. Oh, it does great on all the other kinds of backups and cloning methods that don't involve reformatting. Cloning to existing data allows for minimum amount of backup time due to the choice of adding data that is missing and removing data that is no longer on the source drive. The result it a fast clone that only copies the missing files while removing the ones you removed from the source. The result does result in fragmentation, but that is a secondary matter that is easily corrected by regularly scheduled downtime cloning with the reformat target first approach, and then reversing the procedure to clone back to the original source after reformatting that drive. Really much faster, and safer across the board. I've had no data trouble ever since I stopped using defragment programs, too risky and waste to much time.

Norton Utilities crashed my Mac and it took about a week to get it back. After that I looked for a utility program for the Mac. I can't say it has performed any restoration because I haven't had any crashes or file corruption. But it has more features than any other disc utility I've seen and the amount of tests it makes is impressive. I have a lot more confidence in it than other utility programs.

I understand that there are still some REAL big version issues with Techtool Pro 4 . . . Eeven though the product says it's X compatible, until you get beyond version 4.0.4, it's not Tiger (Mac 10.4) compatible, etc. (I got burned this way - it says it creates a bootable cd, but when you get it home, and opened, it says this won't work with Tiger). Which version is this?

Tec Tools Pro 4 creates a small boot pretition on your hard drive that will boot when your drive fails its not nessary to creat a boot CD. Tec Tools Pro 4 and DISKWORRIOR are all u need to keep your drive in tip top shape.

I have always had good success with Norton Diskdoctor on various Macs and OS's, but ran into a problem that it couldn't fix. So I bought TechTool Pro 4 through Amazon/J&R because the reviews said it was a great program. What a mistake. Micromat doesn't tell you it doesn't work on the newest Macs. I'm using a 1.33 GHz 12 inch powerbook and I can't make a bootable virtual CD or do a cold boot from their CD. After going around with technical services at Micromat 4 times by phone and email, someone there finally acknowledged the program doesn't work on this new Powerbook, blaming Apple. He offered a fix on VersionTracker, but the fix was nowhere to be found. At this point I'm past my 30 day guarantee. In my last email, I explained my problems, including that I was about 40 days from purchase, They said send us the receipt and a copy of the email technical trail, and they will send me a new CD that will work with my machine (apparently they fixed the bug, but you can't download the fix nor do they tell you when you call). I have now faxed all the documentation to them Twice, and have received no response. Since I wanted this to boot off the CD or to make a virtual CD to boot the system, the existing CD is worthless. I wasted my money. And I'm frustrated that I wasted so much time on them. Last product I buy from Micromat.

Unless you want to end up paying for "updates" that Micromat magically renames to upgrades, run away! I too thought I was buying "Techtool Pro VERSION 4". But even though the box you'll see here has "Version 4" all over it in bold red letters, the truth is that I had really purchased one single revision of VERSION 4. It stopped working 2 months later, and when Micromat released an update to TTP4 that was supposed to make it work with OS X 10.5, it was going to cost me even MORE money. Yes, Micromat wanted me to pay to "upgrade" from "Version 4" to "Version 4". Note that here on Amazon, both the full version and the upgrade version boxes are identical. And the upgrade is only $18 less than the full version. They both say "Techtool Pro Version 4", but you have no idea what revision of the full version you're actually buying. If you look for release dates on the "news" portion of Micromat's web site, you'll quickly conclude that it must be 4.6.1, because the next TTP4 announcement you see, 4.5.2, was released way back in Nov. '06. Revision 4.5.3 is suspiciously missing, even though it was released just 4 short months before 4.6.1. So if you paid full price for 4.5.3 on its release date of 7/27/07 and you wanted to be able to update your software in November, get out your wallet, becuase Micromat is fully prepared to pretend to not know the difference between an update to your existing "Version 4" and an upgrade to an actual new version, like "Version 5".

I had a perfectly good WD 2TB external drive until I tried to optimise it using TechTool Pro. This program destroyed the directory and made a lot of the files unrecoverable. This program can destroy your hard drive. Do not use it unless you have a backup of the drive you intend to work on.

my mac shut down and I couldn't boot. I used tech tool pro to diagnose faulty sectors which indicated a bad hard drive. The tech tool allowed me to boot up. I am curious if Disk Warrior would be a better product, but I haven't used it.