Guimikko

I'm sharing a few useful and essential utilities and small apps for Mac and some for Windows I've found useful over the years. They are mostly free, donationware, or shareware.

I'll start off with Startup Sound. The Mac startup chime is nice and sounds great, but it get sold after a while, in fact, it gets old really quick and just generally annoys. And there's no way in the system prefs to set it off. StartupSound is a nifty 3rd party system extension that allows to mute the chime entirely.

SMC Fan Control is a necessity for Apple laptops. The fans on these things are set to run at low RPM by default to keep the laptops quiet. However, when actually working, these laptops heat up quickly, temperatures near the water boiling aren't uncommon. The initial system setting is a bit too low and a bit too slow to react, so with this one you can set the initial fan RPM higher to run your machine cooler all the way. Regular temps on my 13" aluminum unibody MacBook was at 65°C when idle and often hitting 95°C mark fairly fast but this utility keeps the idle temp at 54°C and this results to lower heat peaks even.

Macs need maintenance just as much as the next system out there, IceClean is a system cleaner app, there are others like it, but I came across this one first and am happy with it. It uses maintenance scripts that are actually in OS X, so no worries. I run it semi-regularly after quitting all running apps and let it run all  tasks and either reboot or shutdown.

AppZapper. The slogan says "the app remover Apple left out" and that should say enough. Well, it doesn't remove everything everything always, but still makes it easy and simple.

UnRarX is a file compression tool that handles one common windows archive format, .rar.



MacFuse and NTFS-3G give you system support for NTFS volumes, so you are not completely stuck with FAT32 file system and its restrictions when cross-platforming.

Also check out 30 Mac OS X apps and utilities The Graphic Mac Loves

Windows utilities:

PCWizard is something you should get, and put it on a memory stick you can grab the next time you're called to troubleshoot that IT-illiterate relative's computer. It's like Windows System Info on steroids. It yields almost every possible useful detail from the system and hardware, even stuff you might've not known about your own Windows rig. If you're a performance übergeek, you can even run some performance tests on your setup and compare them.

CCleaner is my choice on the old XP rig and for any Windows for system maintenance and registry cleaning, both regular tasks are necessities in Windows, to keep it running smoothly, despite what your MS rep might tell you. It cleans all that pesky garbage data from the hard drive left in there by installers and uninstallers et al.

Regalyzer is a powerful alternative for the clumsy built-in regedit, allows things like registry-wide find/replace on one go. OTOH, you can also mess the registry up bad, I mean real bad unless you really know what you're doing. That means this goes in the "don't try this at home, kids" -category.

WinRAR is thee compression tool of choice for me in Windows. There are many others like it, but none come close, in my opinion.