What is Socks?

Socks is a collection of useful utilities to help clean, troubleshoot, optimize, maintain, and customize your Mac. Consider these examples:

• Remove unused program executable data and localizations
• Troubleshoot system and application crashes
• Minimize the "spinning beach ball" and improve network bandwidth and latency
• Check and repair internal and external hard disks
• Maintain data structures relied on my the system and applications to work correctly
• Clean application and system usage data to protect your privacy
• Customize system features and the interface to better suit your needs
• Get detailed information about your system, software and hardware.

Configuration and Automation

Socks provides several functional and organization features to organized its features in a clean and intuitive way: presets, queues, and schedules.

Presets: Most tasks allow for some fine-tuning in the way they operate. An example might be cleaning localization files from user-owned applications but not system-owned applications. This fine-tuning is accomplished using "presets." A preset is a set of specific options for a task; it configures the way a task works. Tasks that use presets can have any number of different presets with different settings. Socks comes with a number of pre-tuned presets for each task, and allows you to add and modify your own.

Queues: Sometimes you will want to run more than one task at once -- that's where "queues" come in. Queues allow you to "queued up" a list of tasks to run one-after-another so you can walk away and come back when everything is done. Just like presets, Socks comes with a number of useful queues built-in, and let you add and modify your own.

Schedules: Some tasks (or queues) are useful to run regularly, such as maintenance and cleaning. Socks can automatically run queues at specific times and repeat at specific intervals so you don't have to think about it. Socks can even schedule queues to run automatically in the event that your computer crashes so that it can attempt to fix problems immediately after they occur.

Main Features

Now that you've learned a little about Socks's flexibility, take a look at some of the specific features Socks offers.

S.M.A.R.T. Status Verify physical hard disk characteristics to anticipate hardware failures. Volume Structure Repair minor file system errors before they cause data loss or repair a volume that won't mount. File Permissions Check and repair file permissions that can cause resource access errors. Preference Files Check or disable application and system preference files to fix data retention errors. Launch Services Fix broken or incorrect application-document associations. Dyld Cache Rebuild the dynamic linker's cache to fix applications that won't launch. Spotlight Index Fix missing search results and finicky Spotlight search behavior. Spotlight Importers Fix missing search results and finicky search behavior in specific applications. Locate Database Rebuild the "locate" command-line tool's deep-search database for fast file searches. Volumes Configure volume ownership and journaling settings. Spotlight Configure Spolight indexing behavior for individual volumes. Power Management Configure the Power Manager with hidden options. Interface Configure Mac OS X's interface with hidden options.

Caches Clean and rebuild system and application caches to fix crashes and odd behavior. Logs Remove dormant or archived log files to free up hard drive space. Localizations Remove unused language files to free up hard drive space. Binaries Strip unused executable code from applications to free up hard drive space. Private Data Clean records of application, document, server, command-line, and web usage. Memory Change your system's swap memory location to a faster disk to minimize paging delays. Network Tweak network buffer sizes and protocol properties for optimal performance. Force/Secure Empty Trash Use secure algorithms to permantly erase files and directories. Find Files Use the "locate" database to quickly find deep system/application files Spotlight won't. Show/Hide Files Make files and folders invisible in the Finder with HFS attributes. Relaunch Processes Relaunch frozen, memory-hopping or CPU-hopping system processes. System Info Get detailed repors about your system's hardware and software. Volume Info Get detailed information about the filesystems, connections and disks of mounted volumes. Process Info View a live list of running processes and their system resource utilization.

New in Version 2.0.1

New in Version 2.0

System Requirements

Previous System Versions

Mac OS 10.3 - 10.5 users, download Socks 1.3.7 here.

Technical Support

The Socks help book is an excellent source of information about Socks's major features and organization. Access the help book by selecting the Help -> Socks Help menu from within Socks. FAQs and bulletins are also posted on the support page, and of course you can always email support with any questions or problems!