Weekly Utilities Update: PlugINCool, A Better Finder Attributes, MacDust, more...

Staff Pick: CoolBook

Many times Apple laptops will get exceptionally hot when running through intensive calculations. This heat is usually well within the tolerances of the computer and chips, but sometimes people may wish to be able to control the overall speed of their CPUs in order to better manage the heat dissipation and additionally improve battery life at the expense of computing power. This can help for long-term battery usage and also reduce fan noise.

CoolBook is a utility that can fine-tune the voltage and processor speed of intel-based Mac, including laptops, Mac Minis, and iMacs. The latest version (2.14) provides the following new features:

• Fixed an issue with the self test function.
• Removed support for halved bus frequency on computers with Nvidia chipsets.
• Added support for the new Mini and iMac models.

You can download this utility from the developer's website.

WARNING: Increasing the CPU voltage and frequency above factory specifications may harm your computer, so please take caution if you try to use this utility to overclock your processor.

Other Recent Utility Updates:

• PlugINCool 1.2.1 - A plugin manager for many OS X applications
• TM Error Logger 1.2 - Time Machine error reporting and interpretation utility
• MacDust 3.08 - System optimization, maintenance and drive cleaning utility
• Springy 1.5.1 - Browse, extract, create, and manage archives and compressed files in multiple formats
• SourceGear DiffMerge 3.3.0 - Visually compare files and merge differences.
• What's Keeping Me 1.4 - Clears and troubleshoots problems with trashing files and ejecting disks.

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