AppleJack for Intel Macs
Posted November 13th, 2006 @ 12:21pm by Erik J. Barzeski
AppleJack is now available for Intel Macs. I've never installed AppleJack on my own machines, and it came out shortly after I stopped working as a Mac Genius, so I never tested it there.
I'm a little leery to install such a low-level tool, but it's been around for quite some ((Though, since this is the first Intel release, I may still wait a version or two.)) time and I've not heard many bad things about it. Do you use AppleJack? How has your experience been?
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Posted 13 Nov 2006 at 1:03pm #
I have had it installed on my old iMac for quite sometime, and thankfully I have only had to use it once. But it did what it advertised.
I have it installed on my MacBook, but I haven't had to use it yet. No issues so far.
Posted 13 Nov 2006 at 2:06pm #
I don't, because it's a "spaghetti test" tool. It doesn't help you troubleshoot or analyze. It lets you run a set of actions, usually all at once, and you hope they're all correct. That's not anything close to proper problem fixing.
Posted 13 Nov 2006 at 2:31pm #
I agree is doesn't help you troubleshoot, but it sure saved my bacon!!!
Posted 13 Nov 2006 at 2:57pm #
I run it once every two or three weeks. It's kind of like Cocktail, it clears out caches, checks preference files, etc.
It's excellent for troubleshooting if you've got a laptop with a dead optical drive, or something. And a while back, I played a game that somehow deeply messed up a cache, or something...and upon rebooting after playing the game, I couldn't boot into the Finder. A deep clean in AppleJack (which generally isn't necessary) took care of whatever was wrong, and I could get into the Finder again.
Sure, if you really want to track down whatever problem you're having, you can do that...but this generally lets you run a number of utilities, one after another, and in many cases just works. If you've still got a problem, troubleshoot...but why waste your time if it's just a cache that needs to be cleared, or a messed up preference file?
Posted 13 Nov 2006 at 7:39pm #
I've had this installed on about 5-7 machines for over a year. I believe it only uses Apple's routines and Kristofer is really intense about it not causing any harm.
Some may think it voodoo but I tend to run it after every system update.