AAUG Reviews

by Carlene Brown ,AAUG Member

My PowerBook G4 has been a very dependable laptop. It has never given me any problems. However, it is four years old, has a limited hard drive capacity, 60 GB, and is slow compared to the new Apple models. After installing Leopard it started taking a long time to boot and was running slow with some programs having a hard time just opening. When I started seeing more and more spinning beach balls I knew it was time to do something.

That something was to run it through a utility program, which found some problems but was unable to correct them as I didn’t have enough contiguous space to save even a 200 MB file, and though the program could tell me what was wrong it could not fix it.

What to do? I have two utility programs that I run regularly to keep up with the maintenance of my computers but obviously neither program was doing the defragmenting that was needed.

While searching the internet for a solution I discovered Drive Genius 2 by Prosoft Engineering. Drive Genius 2 is designed for Mac OS X and is the disk utility Apple uses at their Genius Bar to defrag your drive. (Part of the ProCare program offered by Apple.)

Drive Genius 2 contains a collection of tools to maintain, manage and optimize your hard drive. Here are a few of the things Drive Genius 2 can do….

• Analyze, Repair and Rebuild OS X directory information.
• Defragment OS X drives for optimum performance.
• Create high-speed backup clones of most devices.
• Securely erase drives.
• Add, delete or resize partitions without reformatting.
• Long range throughput tests for performance and diagnostics.
• Benchtests for comparing drive performance.
• Surface scanning to test for media faults.
• Low level sector editing for the expert users.

Drive Genius 2 comes on a bootable DVD which allows you to boot from the DVD and work directly on your main hard drive. You can also install the application to work on other internal or external drives.

I began the maintenance and repair session by making a bootable backup of my hard drive just in case something went wrong. I next booted from the DVD. The Drive Genius 2 user interface consists of colorful icons that allow you to choose the specific tool you want to use including Disk Information, Defrag, Benchtest, Repair, Integrity Check and Scan. Proceeding to the next page there are more tool icons including Initialize, Repartition, Duplicate, Shred, and Sector Edit.

I chose the defragmenting tool, selected my hard drive and clicked on start. The user’s manual cautions that it will take between 30 minutes and an entire day to complete this process depending on the amount of fragmentation and the speed of your processor. My laptop barely meets the minimum system requirements for this software and it took 48 hours to complete the defragging process. A graphic appears as you begin this process and shows the extent of fragmentation of the hard drive and then another appears when it is finished. Wow, what a difference, the empty spaces were in tiny bits and pieces spread throughout the drive when it began and ended with the filled and empty spaces, respectively, in tight individual sections.

I ran the other repair sequences. Some minor disk structure repairs were done. Then I rebuilt the directory, where some corrections were also made. I ran all the test and repair tools. The tests and comparisons all looked good.

The bottom line - my laptop is back to running smoothly with no more spinning beach balls
and no loss of data.

Prosoft’s customer service policy includes replacing a lost DVD or sending an updated DVD for a charge of just $5.00. They also offer unlimited free pre and post technical phone or email support.

There are some tools that are too advanced for me and I will probably never use in this collection of hard disk tools but the major maintenance and repair aspects of the software are well worth the investment. Prosoft suggests using this software to maintain and optimize your hard drive on a regular basis (every two to four months) to prevent major problems. I would recommend giving Drive Genius 2 a trial. A free demo is available to download

System Requirements
• DVD drive
• Mac OS 10.4.9 or newer
• User interface animations require Quartz Extreme support (G4 or newer)
• 256mb RAM
• 1.0GHz processor minimum