CheckUp Application

Update.--The company graciously replied it's a known problem with PPC's, and with Intel Mac's, it uses only about a half percent of the cpu at any time. Ok, then it's a cool, useful and helpful tool, but it's not quite an Emily Latella moment.

Original Post.--There is an application for Mac computers, see Apple's download Web page for it. It's a cool tool for some system level checks and work, combining several applications into one handy one. But that said, do not buy and install it unless you're willing to live with a small resource hog on your Mac that you can't control.

Ok, let me explain. First, it installs at system (root) level, so it's out of the user's control to turn on and off. And that's the issue. Every few minutes it does its system checks and uses about 25% of the cpu for the brief time (~20 seconds) it's working. It doesn't use much space (~36MBytes) but uses a lot of cpu. And this time accumulates to become one of the largest users over time.

This is strange since it has Apple's staff pick they didn't see this or comment on it. I won't argue it's useful and helpful, and with more powerful or faster Mac's it probably doesn't impact the system and work very much, but for the old PPC Mac's, it's not wise to install it. You don't need to see your processor drop 25+% while you're working because of this one application.

And it installs a user application in your login account. If you remove it when you don't run the user application part, it only reinstalls it the next time you open the application. Again, it's cool with a lot of good tools, but it should be user controllable for both the continuous running application and the user application parts. All the other applications, even Apple's Activity and Network Monitor applications do that. And they're also not resource hogs.

Anyway, I bought it and like it for some things, like the full memory chip test (took 5+ hours for 4.5 GB and found no errors), but I also uninstalled it, and only plan to re-install it when I need it again. And my cpu is working nicely again with the real stuff of work and not this one which breaks in and steal the cpu for awhile every now and then.