From time to time you may find that your Mac starts to really slow down. It’s really painful for myself when I have a whole bunch of apps open and then my computer comes to a near complete halt. Normally a restart helps to solve the problem and I do get some better performance but that really is only a remedy. There are a few maintenance apps on the Mac but really not many can compare to the full feature set of Cocktail. Not only does Cocktail feature some typical maintenance tasks but it also has a few extras.
The Features
Cocktail divides itself into six tabs: Disks, System, Files, Network, Interface, and Pilot. Each of these contains tasks that pertain to the respective category. The Disk tab has tasks that allow you to enable/disable journaling, repair disk permissions, settings for what to do when the computer sleeps, and some last miscellaneous options. System has some scripts that you can run, spotlight things, database fixes, start up options and some more miscellaneous options. Files has caches options, preference fixes, and some pretty nifty things you can do to files (like deleting locked files). The Network tab has some things that I don’t think the average user (myself included) will find necessary to mess with, however there are some cool filesharing options. As an almost extra, Cocktail includes some interface customization options which I will go into later. Finally the Pilot option is probably the most useful and easiest thing to understand. It lets you run scheduled scripts and just preform the basic maintenance tasks. Many of these options you might not know what they do but the Cocktail help really helps out in explaining and I’ll be doing some copy & paste from it to explain the options (seeing as I’ll most likely get them wrong).
Disks
The Disks tab controls a bunch of disk related features as well as give you access to repair permissions, the same thing that’s there in your Disk Utility. There’s not much else I can put to that explanation and all I know is that it’s a pretty good thing to do. There are also options for how the hard drive behaves when the computer sleeps, user login, and disabling the sudden motion sensor.
System
The System tab lets you first run scripts that “perform a variety of system maintenance tasks” and it run scripts that are daily, weekly and monthly. It’s a good way to just keep your Mac tuned and running smoothly for a continual basis. Another thing you can do in the System tab is fix the Spotlight indexes if they become corrupt. You can tell when this happens if you search in Spotlight something pretty generic that should have results but none show up. Another useful option included is enabling Kiosk mode which disables restart, shut down, and the log out commands in the Apple menu.
Interface
The funnest thing that you can toy around with is the Interface options, and they are quite extensive. You can do a variety of things from placing scroll arrow positions to the super useful option where you can disable that oh so annoying application crash dialog box. It’s an extremely useful bunch of options and they alone are what would make me seriously consider buying this app.
Files
Files lets you preforms specific functions to individual files using a drop zone. Along with individual file functions there is also the ability to clear caches (which can boost performance) and a search for corrupted preference files and fix them. The first file function you can do is delete DS store files. These files are created when you first open a folder in the Finder. It holds information about folder view options, icon positions, and other vital information relating to it’s folder. We can’t see them but if you go on another operating system (such as Windows) they can see these files. This is dangerous if your uploading or burning files/folders because the DS Store files contain some information about your system configuration.
Network
Cocktail has some pretty cool Network optimization options but these are for advanced users who will know what terms like NewReno Fast Recovery, RFC - 1323, recieve buffer size, etc. mean (which I don’t). I wouldn’t recommend mucking around with these settings because you could conceivably do some pretty good damage (however it is easily recoverable). The final option in the Network tab has File Sharing options but I don’t find these relevant to myself and I only see this useful to people who are on a pretty big network and need these options.
Pilot
The final and probably the main option for me is the Pilot tab. This basically lets you run set maintenance tasks at daily, weekly or monthly intervals. It’s good if you really don’t care for half the different functions Cocktail includes. I ran this when my computer was really acting slow and I noticed a considerable speed up in my computers performance.
The bottom line…
For fifteen buck this app gives you an extremely good amount of features. For the hardcore and very tech savvy user, this app is perfect. There’s a lot of room for optimization of your system. For the casual Mac user who doesn’t really care a whole lot, the Pilot feature will take care of the tasks for you and the interface customizations is pretty sweet. The ease of use, the multitude of options and the performance gains definitely make this one of the best maintenance utilities on the Mac. Is it worth 15 bucks? Yes it is! Cocktail is available for both Power PC and Intel Macs. For more info and a free trial, visit the Cocktail homepage.
