June 9th, 2000
Cast Off 1.0 Review by Nancy Carroll Gravley Introduction Cast Off is a new preference folder cleansing utility designed to get rid of old, orphaned preferences that just clutter up your hard drive. Anyone who has ever downloaded trial software and later discarded it, or who updated older versions of software will have preferences from all those applications or utilities left in the system folder. This utility will almost instantly identify those orphaned preferences and offer you the chance to delete them, and it is extremely simple to use. This updated version was released May 30, 2000.
Documentation This is such an easy utility to use that there are only 4 paragraphs of instructions. Instructions are well written and very easy to follow. The utility practically runs itself.
Cast Off will run on any PowerPC Macintosh with Mac OS 7.6 or later.
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How It Works Cast Off uses two methods to determine what is orphaned. First it looks in your desktop database (were a reference to all applications are stored), if it doesn't find anything then it moves on to the second step. During the second step it scans your entire hard drive(s) looking for a matching file. If any matching files/applications are found then Cast Off determines that it isn't orphaned. If the preference fails both tests then it is considered orphaned. Even after that though it will not remove anything without your direction to do so.
Operation Double click to open the utility. Click on "scan" and the utility immediately opens and scans for orphaned preferences which it then lists on your desktop.
Click on image to see full size This sample from my machine shows some of what was found, and obviously they are not things I need to keep. To instruct the utility to delete them I simply click in the box to the left of each item. As soon as I do so the delete button becomes active and I can click to delete the chosen items. If you are running a trial version you can only delete 5 items at a time. Otherwise, you can hit them all at once. You can click on each item (as demonstrated in the image above) and immediately get the necessary information you may need to determine if you want to keep or discard the item. Options available with this utility include:
Conclusion Instructions are easy to access and to follow. It is a well designed utility that focuses on just what it is designed to do and nothing else, and I encountered no bugs during my trial testing. I recommend it for new users as well as the more experienced. Everyone should get in the habit of removing unnecessary items from their hard drive periodically. It is good management sense for optimizing the operation of your computer.
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