The Macintosh Business Users Society
of Greater Philadelphia
|
MacBUS The Macintosh Business Users Society of Greater Philadelphia |
|
Home Meetings About Membership Friends Reviews Resources MacBUS Blog Contact |
“Drive Genius 1.1.5 Maintain, Manage, and optimize your hard drive” by ProSoft Engineering By ProSoft Engineering For more information, visit: ProSoft Engineering’s Drive Genius page. Drive Genius sells for $99.00. Hardware requirements: Minimum System Requirements Drive Genius requires a system with a G3 processor or higher that is capable of running Mac OS X 10.2 or above. Description of program or book: Disk/System Diagnostic, Repair, and Management Tools Suite that replaces Disk Guardian. This version of the disk we received is an older version of the software. Drive Genius Version 1.1 added the following to the diagnostic suite: • Updated internal manual. • Additional checking before volume duplication. • New free space shredding feature. • Attach Disk Image feature allows mounting of disk images while booted from CD While Apple’s own Disk First Aid/Disk Utility has a diagnostic and disk repair routine, Drive Genius can not only repair disk anomalies but also optimize, protect, defragment, and analyze volumes. There are many routines that users will find very helpful to maintain their hardware integrity. Strengths: Drive Genius supports: Resize volumes on the fly; add and delete a volume; device cloning; device/volume backup to image; recovery of bad blocks and cloning; initializing drives; and OSX partitioning for block devices. Weakness & Limitations: The only weakness is inconsistency. As a member of several user groups I have asked different people their impressins of Drive Genius. The responses were varied. Some functions worked fine on some computers and bombed on others. Everyone I talked to seem to have successes and failures to discuss. Drive Genius's main competitors are Micromat's TechTool 4, and Drive 10, and Alsoft's DiskWarrior. Symantec’s Norton Utilities is no longer supported for Tiger. Comments: In conclusion I would say that Drive Genius is an impressive application that will help you maintain and manage your hard drive. It will something to have in your grab bag for times when the “I wish I had done that gremlin” shows his ugly head. It is not perfect; there are other programs that do many of the functions better. However, I don’t know of a program that does everything well. Ratings: *****Excellent ****good ***average **weak/acceptable *poor Ease of installation: **** Documentation: *** Product support: *** Packaging: **** QuickTime usage: *** Overall rating: *** Appropriate for: _x__Business _x__Education _x__Personal Reviewer: Linda McNeil is a Pa. media specialist. She has a master’s degree in Library/Media and Curriculum development. She has administered an electronically networked library that contained state of the art equipment utilizing interactive video, digitized images, on-line searching, computer integration, etc. For the past 30+ years she has reviewed books and audiovisual materials for a TriState YA Reviewing group in Southeast PA. In addition, Linda teaches several online and classroom courses to adults/teachers for the PA Dept. of Education. Linda is also a professional artist (22 lithographs, 120 etchings, graphics, and artist books) and she maintains her own website (www.brushcolor.com) |
|