14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier this week, Micromat announced the upcoming version of TechTool Protogo, an excellent Mac OS X application that can turn your old iPod into a bootable diagnostic tool for your computer. Is that awesome or not? After all, there are so many people having more than a single iPod... why throw it away or sell it, when you can give it a really noble purpose?
TechTool Protogo makes diagnose, maintenance and repair tasks a real pleasure, and you don't have to be a computer geek to do it. Protogo helps you create a bootable diagnostic device in a snap, and during this process, your device is filled with Micromat's most powerful tools, but you can also add your own programs as you wish (and as the free space on that iPod or portable drives allows it, of course). Once you finished adding programs to your boot device, the troubleshooting iPod is ready to go!
Once you plug your device, you'll be able to boot up most Macintosh computers, diagnose and repair hard drive problems, test your system's hardware components, search, locate and take care of viruses and system conflicts, optimize and defragment hard drive volumes, rebuild volume directories and recover data from damaged volumes, safely repartition hard drives, without any data loss, boot different Mac OS versions located in different partitions and, of course, run a variety of utilities of your choice.
This program requires a Macintosh computer capable of running Mac OS X 10.4 or later (no problems with the Intel ones, since it comes as a Universal Binary), a DVD-ROM drive, 512MB of RAM or more and a target device, like your older iPod... The new version is expected to begin shipping at next week's Macworld Expo, and the price is settled at 135$.