What is Chaos Master 1.2.x?

Regardless of how hefty your hard drive is, you probably scramble for space whenever you burn a CD or install software, all the while wondering where those gigabytes fled. Casady & Greene’s Chaos Master helps you minimize hard drive clutter and manage software, although its quirks and price make it more attractive as part of the Mac Care Unit... than as a stand-alone purchase.

When first launched, Chaos Master suggests that you rebuild your desktop — it doesn’t automate the process, so you have to do it manually. Afterward, a wizard leads you through a series of searches that scan all of your hard drives for potentially spacewasting files — you decide what to do with the result. We recovered 300MB on our 30GB drive, deleting Web-browser caches, abandoned preferences, old help files, and many forgotten downloads.

Chaos Master’s results are impressive, but evaluating every file individually took considerable effort. You need to be extremely careful about what you remove — what looks like an orphaned file or empty folder might be crucial data, and Chaos Master does little to help novices understand whaf s important and what’s garbage. The software selects candidates for removal, but we neverfelt confident enough to trust its judgment. For example, the program tagged our Mac OS 9.1 printer description files as orphaned text files, and gave the same categorization to the golf animations in Links LS 2000.

Two other features did little to ease our qualms. Version tracking, which searches the Version Tracker Web site for software updates, did note some patches we missed, but it also confused Astrolog, a freeware astrology program, with MacSofts Asteroids. Uninstall fared unevenly, removing only parts of Norton Personal Firewall, leaving the folder and help files behind, and acting a little too proactively when uninstalling BBEdit (it offered to remove not only the application, but also all the text files we created with it).

Chaos Master makes it easier to track down garbage files and find orphaned aliases, but it’s a pricey and uninspiring alternative to going it alone.

Tuinman, Jaap O. (September 2001). Chaos Master. MacAddict. (pg. 52).

Download Chaos Master 1.2.x for Mac

Architecture

IBM PowerPC

System Requirements

From Mac OS 8.1

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver