There are many applications we find invaluable and rely on them for our daily usage. In this post, we’ll write about some of them. Note that our selection of apps reflects our personal needs and tastes and this post is primarily intended to give tribute to these tools and perhaps show various options to our readers. We’re sure many of you have your own personal favorites and many of those would be different from ours. Keep this in mind when reading the article. This post will only cover generic utility apps, we won’t write about apps we use for developing - perhaps we’ll cover them in a future post…

Some weeks ago my late 2007 MacBook Pro 15” started having issues during boot – it presented gray Apple logo with a bar graph underneath which went somewhere near 1/4th the way two times and then the computer would just turn off without any warning. I immediately checked various forums and tried all suggestions, but nothing worked. Luckily I had my Tech Tool Pro 5 DVD ready so I booted with it and performed all bunch of tests, even waited an hour for HD bad sectors search, however no problem whatsoever was reported. I also performed volume rebuild, restarted and voila – OS X booted (still preceded with gray bar graph though). Once there, I ran Disk Utility to repair permissions and it didn’t report any problem.