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There are many programs I can live without but Drive Genius 3 is not one of them; it is a ‘must have’.

For several months, my hard drive seemed to be

taking longer to boot up, some of my apps were running slower than I thought they should, sometimes I’d see the ‘spinning ball from hell’. Then I came across this program that is touted to “maintain, manage and optimize your hard drive.”

Before using the program, I backed up my hard drive with Time Machine. The free hard drive space was at 122.0 GB. As an experiment and for later comparison, I shut down then restarted. It took about 40 seconds to get to my login window then another 50 seconds to the Desktop for a total of 1 minute and 30 second boot.

Next, I inserted the Drive Genius 3 disc and restarted holding down the ‘C’ key. Drive Genius came up with a window to enter the serial number. After entering the serial number, the following window (see Figure 1) showed the various tool options. As you run the cursor over each icon, a message appears telling what that specific tool function does. I’ll give you a detailed rundown of each function as told by Prosoft, then tell you how I went about cleaning up my HD.

Information (see Figure 2) This tool displays detailed information about your drives (if you have more than one hard drive connected to the computer) and volumes. Information displayed includes accurate size, free space available, S.M.A.R.T. status, file system type, File/Folder counts and more.

Defrag — optimized the HFS volumes for maximum performance. Defrag will re-organize each file into a continuous area of your volume allowing your computer to perform less work while recovering your files. (see Figure 3) This is worth the price alone! Figure 4 shows how fragmented Files/Folders can get over time. And this translates into faster loading of apps and/or opening of files.

Drive Genius 3A HARD DRIVE UTILITY PROGRAM BY PROSOFT ENGINEERING, INC.

review by Kathy Aanestad

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

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DriveSlim™ is a tool that recovers volume space by removing unused files, duplicate files, unused localizations and more. (See Figure 5)

Repair reminds me of Apple’s Disk Utility app. This app will verify, repair or rebuild the directory information on your HFS volumes. Use the Verify function frequently to monitor the health of your volumes directory structures and use Repair and Rebuild as needed to correct potential problems. (See Figure 6)

Scan quickly scans each and every byte on your drive in search of hardware block errors. When found, the errors will cause the internal recovery mechanisms in your drive to de-allocate defective areas marking them as not-for-use by your computer.

DrivePulse® monitors your drives and volumes in the background for reliability and performance, alerting you of possible issues before they become problems. (See Figure 8)

Integrity Check™ performs long turm integrity tests on your drives. Those tests are similar to those used by the drive manufacturer to ensure long-term reliability of your drive. (See Figure 9)

Initialize quickly erases selected drive and creates anew HFS+ volume on a drive making it empty and ready to use by your computer. (See Figure 10)

Repartition adjusts the partition layout of your drives without re-initializing by Expanding, Shrinking, Adding, Deleting, Hiding volumes. (See Figure 11) In the ‘old’ days, if I wanted to repartition my hard drive, I’d have to re-initialize it by wiping it clean, then repartition it!

Duplicate quickly makes an extra coy of one drive to another. Optionally copy a drive to a new disk image file. (See Figure 12)

Shred securely erases files, folders, and drives by overwriting all data with a secure pattern strength of your choice. (See Figure 13)

Benchtest performs speed tests on your drives and volumes to compare with stored results from this or other computers. Comparisons are displayed in a raw-data format or one of two selectable graph layouts. (See Figure 14)

Sector Edit edits the raw date of a drive, volume or file. This is FOR EXPERT USE ONLY!

Figure 5 Figure 6

Figure 7 Figure 8

Figure 9 Figure 10

Figure 11 Figure 12

Figure 13 Figure 14

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OK, so I performed the Benchtest first. Remember, I am still running off the the Drive Genius 3 disc. I selected the computer’s HD and clicked the START button. A warning message appeared telling me that this operation may cause data loss. If the computer is turned off or a volume error occurred while this operation is in progress, date may be lost. Please make sure you have a current backup of your data. I do!

So with this information at hand I decided to CANCEL and run the Information operation.

Again, you have to select the HD icon and both General and Details of the HD are displayed. (See Figure 15).

Next I ran the Defrag tool (under Volume Fragmentation tab). A message box appeared telling me the used space showed 26% fragmented (19.61% of total space). A defrag is recommended. So I clicked the START button. Received that same warning message as with the Benchtest. I clicked to continue to Verify & Defrag. This procedure takes a few minutes (3 minutes and 23 seconds to be exact) to complete so be patient. When the procedure is finished, click Done. After the Defrag, the message window read “Defrag completed successfully.”

Curious about removing unused files or duplicate files, etc., I ran DriveSlim™. To do this, select your HD icon. You are presented with 5 “slimming” options:

1) Large files >10 MB and not accessed in the last 30 days

2)Duplicate files >1MB and replace them with an alias

3)Unused Localizations - localized resources for any language except English.

4)Universal Binaries - applications that contain support for non-Intel processors.

5)Cache/Temporary Items - find Cache and temporary items not accessed in the last 14 days

I checked the Large File box to search out files larger than 10 MB and that have not been accessed within the past 30 days. This took almost 35 minutes and found 3,609 files larger than 10 MB, file sizes ranging from 687.83MB to 5.22GB, totaling 74.69GBs. Spent quite a bit of time deciding which files to purge and which to keep. The files are easy to read. Every other line is colored light blue with a check box, file name, info on

where the file is located, and file size. I wound up selecting 319 items = 3.71 GB to purge.

If you’ve never deFragged your computer before, plan on spending a good portion of the day running Drive Genius 3 to get your HD slimmer, trimmer, faster and organized. Figure 16 shows a nice clean defragged HD.

On to the Duplicate Files. The program found 1,976 items = 10.11GB. The window gives you the option of marking items you want to remove or modify or select Cancel to start a new search. Clicking the check mark above the boxes selects all and toggles on/off.

Unused Localizations - this program searches for all the unused ones and like the other search windows I select the ones to be removed. Drive Genius 3 found 901 files totaling 2.59 GB. Localizations to be removed for example: Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish. The localizations vary depending upon which application is selected.

Figure 15

Figure 16

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For example, Disc Cover has 6 languages associated with it vs. Safari with 17. DriveSlim™ creates an archive of the languages removed from each app.

The Cache and Temporary Items app found 4,553 items = 873.41MB. The program created another archive folder to store those deleted cache files.

Because I’ve never run a program like Drive Genius 3 on my iMac, the scanning for bad blocks and performing all sorts of maintenance operations took a couple hours. At the finish, I clicked Quit and rebooted.

How long did it take to Restart? Just a little over 1 minute, an improvement of about 30 seconds! It felt like my apps opened more quickly and shut down more quickly. And two days later a pop up message appeared from Drive Genius 3’s DrivePulse app telling me one of my external HDs had some block errors. I ran the program which fixed the problems. Peace of mind!

So the bottom line is that I’m a happy user and feel confident that my computer’s hard drive and my other external hard drives (10) that I use on a regular basis have all been checked and scanned and are in good

working order. The programs are very user-friendly, instructions easy to follow and if

you’re not sure about performing a particular function, there is always the Cancel button; then read the Help!

Remember, there is no substitute for backing up your data, so once you’ve done that, get Drive Genius 3 and give your hard drive a complete check up.

You’ll be happy you did. I am.

The System Requirements are Mac OS 10.5.3+/ 10.6 / 10.7; 512 MB RAM minimum; Intel®

processor; DVD drive. The Drive Genius 3 disc is a Bootable DVD. Macs not supported by the bootable disc are MacBook Pro released 10/2011, MacBook Air released 7/2011 or Mac Mini released 7/2011. You can access Drive Genius 3’s website for workarounds. The cost is $99.

Mac Tip of the Week #377Excerpted from Mac OS X Lion: Visual QuickStart Guide by Maria Langer

Organize Launchpad Icons into FoldersIs the Launchpad (OS X Lion) area on your Mac inconveniently crowded with icons? You can give your Launchpad icons more elbow room by organizing them into folders that group the apps into related categories. This feature can restore the visual space in Launchpad, making your screen look less cluttered. Follow these steps:

1. In Launchpad, find two icons that you want to group into a folder. For example, you might want to group Preview and Photo Booth.

2. Drag the icon for one of the apps onto the other icon. The destination icon turns into a dark colored square, and then a folder menu containing the destination icon opens beneath it. Launchpad automatically creates the folder and menu, assigning an appropriate name. In

this example, Launchpad might create a folder called Entertainment.

3. Release the button to drop the icon into the folder.

4. Click the folder icon to go back to Launchpad's main screen. Notice the square icon representing the new folder, located in the grid position formerly occupied by the destination icon.

5. Drag another icon onto the new folder icon and release it. Repeat this step for every application you want to include in the folder.

Each item you add to a Launchpad folder is represented on the folder icon by a tiny version of the app's original icon. You can easily see how many apps are grouped into that folder.