Recently I was able to test out and review Disk Expert from Nektony.

Disk Expert is a hard-drive management program for Macs, and assists you in locating the files which are taking up the most room on your Mac’s hard drive. This is our first video review, and I had to edit (and record) this a few times until I was happy enough with it.

I really liked Disk Expert. The UI is very smooth, yet displays so much information. It’s one of the best looking maintenance utilities for Mac that I’ve seen in a long time. It won’t be leaving my hard drive for a while that’s for sure.

I didn’t mention this in the video review, but Disk Expert is able to scan external drives too.

Enjoy the video!

Back in September we wrote a review about MacKeeper which looked at how to clean up a Mac with MacKeeper. Well, since MacKeeper is such an indepth piece of software we thought we’d take a look at some of the other parts of the program. Since our last post covered MacKeeper’s cleaning utility, for this post we’ll take a look at optimization, and all the wonderful ways you can keep your Mac like new.

As you can see, the optimization section of MacKeeper consists of three items – Update Tracker, Login Items, and Default Apps. Let’s take a look at Update Tracker.

Update Tracker in MacKeeper

Update tracker works by checking each application installed on your Mac and seeing if there’s a new version. The applications on your Mac which are marked as up-to-date are seen as green, and any out-of-date application is seen as red. Any out-of-date software on your Mac can be updated by clicking on the update button. Here’s how my Mac looked before running Update Tracker:

So, I clicked on the Update All icon and began to have some issues. My intention at this point was to show you how my apps looked once they were all updated. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

I had about 38 pieces of software which required updating, so I clicked the Update All button. The first piece of software I had problems with was Comic Life – MacKeeper froze about 3.5 MBs into the download. I then quit the application thinking it was a software issue, then went through the same process – the same issue occurred. I tried to update another app, and at this time, the progress bar and all subsequent updates froze. Enough was enough at this point so I contacted the Live Chat from within MacKeeper (which is an awesome idea). Unfortunately, the best they could give me was to shut down the MacKeeper process from within Utilities and to try again, and if this didn’t happen, then just download the programs from their developers website.

Since there are some apps on this list that I only use once every few months, this was a pretty futile solution, so I decided to go through the apps which I use most and update them from within MacKeeper. Unfortunately, this was inconsistent. Some of the programs updated, and some didn’t, freezing about 10MBs away from downloading. Very frustrating.

Login Items in MacKeeper

The Login Items part of MacKeeper allows you to control which programs start when you login to your Mac, and which don’t.

You can control these programs via the checkboxes on the side, or even add/remove items from the list. I didn’t have any issues with this part of MacKeeper, and I found that it worked great. It actually allowed me to remove items which I never even knew were starting up whenever I logged in.

Default Apps in MacKeeper

When you run Default Apps for the first time it will scan your Mac’s hard drive to look for associations between programs and file types. It allows you to define which program opens which type of file. It also shows current associations between all file types and applications which open them.

You can select which software is applicable for the file type, and then also choose from a range of different filetypes to which you want to associate that program with. When I reviewed the list MacKeeper gave me, I was pretty happy with the current programs and associations, so unless there’s anything you just have to have changed, leave things in here as they are.

Conclusion

Aside from the issues I had with the Update Tracker, the rest of MacKeeper’s optimization section worked pretty well. However, it truly won’t be an optimization piece of software until they fix the issues with downloads timing out and freezing up.

MacKeeper is available for just $39.95. Even with the issues I had, this is still a great deal, especially when you consider all that you get a whole suite of tools bundled into one program.

When I made the switch from PC to Mac four years ago, I was amazed by how effortlessly I could maintain my Mac (I still am). But four years later, I’m almost sure that I could do a better job in maintaining and cleaning my Mac. One of the many reasons I’m a Mac user is that there are some very creative and talented developers who strive to make the Mac computing experience even better.

Enter MacCleaning. MacCleaning is a nifty menubar utility that effortlessly monitors your hard drive for free space, cleans up system junk, and offers ejecting mounted drives with just one click. Instead of over promising and under-delivering, MacCleaning does a very efficient job.

MacCleaning Options

In the preferences, there’s an option to be warned when you free space drops below a certain percentage. Currently, those percentages are at 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40%. What I like about this is that you can set to be warned and then run the program to help you free up some space. I probably wouldn’t set it to 10%, so I’d say the least you need to be warned at is 20%.

MacCleaning lets you choose which places you wish to clean. Those places are:

• System Caches
• User Caches
• System Logs
• User Logs
• User Trash
• User Downloads folder.

There’s also the option to launch MacCleaner at login. I’d say that this isn’t really necessary because you probably won’t be cleaning your Mac every day, but I’d like an option to launch every two weeks to run some cleaning.

There are two versions of MacCleaning available. I used the Pro version for review purposes, but there’s also the free version. However, the free version only offers fast clean and real time disk monitoring – there is no option to eject mounted drives with one click, and the warning to be reminded when your hard drive space drops to a certain percentage is removed.

The requirements for MacCleaning are minimal – Mac OS X or later, 512 MB of RAM or more, and 2.8 MB of HD space available.

Get MacCleaning Free!

MacCleaning are currently offering their Pro version for just $4.99 – reduced from the normal price of $9.99. But guess what? We have 15 copies of MacCleaning to give away! The first 15 people who leave a comment on this post (with a legitimate email address) will receive the Pro version of MacCleaning. Contest ends Tuesday 27th December, 2011 11:59pm CST.