However, these don’t do enough to explain all the software’s features. There is a one-page FAQ and a one-page user’s guide on the Avanquest website. Avanquest Software says that it aims to reply to queries within 12 hours. The Free version doesn’t have technical support. You can find answers to common questions in Avanquest Software's knowledgebase (Image credit: Avanquest Software) Supportĭriver Genius has free 24/7 technical support if you pay for the software. It includes around 60 tweaks that aid performance, such as turning off Windows error reporting and speeding up DNS parsing. The System Booster tool aims to optimize your computer with optimized settings in the registry. The System Cleanup is a basic temporary file remover that you can find in many free PC cleanup tools. The SSD Speeder improves the performance of your solid-state drives with recommended settings in the registry. The System Transfer Assistant can be used to transfer network drivers to a new computer, ensuring that you have internet access after installing a new operating system.ĭriver Genius 20 Platinum also includes three tools for optimizing your PC. Clean Invalid Devices can remove from the registry devices that no longer exist on your computer. This can help save space on your hard drive. You can choose to back up all currently used drivers, the original Windows drivers, or individual drivers, among other options.Ī Driver Cleanup feature enables you to remove invalid driver packages from your system. You can back up and restore your drivers with the Driver Backup utility. The core of Driver Genius 20 Platinum is the Driver Update utility, but it has a few other features too. Prosoft Engineering.Driver Genius 20 Platinum has features that go far beyond driver management (Image credit: Avanquest Software) Features It’s one of the first apps I install on a new Mac because the thought of DrivePulse NOT monitoring my attached disks 24/7 scares me spit-less. The Bottom Lineĭrive Genius has proven its value time and again by alerting me to potential problems I’d otherwise be oblivious to, and then letting me repair the damage and get back to work as quickly as possible. Since both are priced at $99, you’re probably going to only buy one, and Drive Genius delivers more bang for your buck. It might or might not do it better than DiskWarrior, but in my experience over the years they both do a great job, but Drive Genius also does much more: Drive Genius’s utilities (right), and its list of drives (left). But while DiskWarrior may (or may not) be a better choice for rebuilding damaged disk directories (the jury’s still out), rebuilding damaged directories is pretty much all DiskWarrior can do.ĭrive Genius also fixes directory damage. I’ve used Drive Genius for over a decade, and I trust it more than any other disk utility except (perhaps) DiskWarrior. hard) disk, there is a defragmenting utility that can improve overall performance, boot time, application launch times, and how quickly large files open.ĭrive Genius also monitors your startup disk for system changes during login and notifies you if a change occurs (this is a common vector for malware).įinally, Drive Genius can almost always repair or rebuild a damaged disk after it alerts you of the issue. There’s also a malware scanner, as well as both physical and consistency checks for your disks. It also includes utilities for cloning, securely erasing, repartitioning, and initializing hard or solid-state drives. Drive Genius Utilitiesīut, Drive Genius does much more than just monitor your drives for issues before they become problems. The scan took hours but it ran in the background, so it didn’t interfere with other work on my Mac. I then used Drive Genius’s Find Duplicates and Find Large Files utilities to find and remove nearly 1TB of duplicate and large files. The onscreen alert a few minutes later was worded a bit more strongly: This more strongly worded DrivePulse alert appeared on my screen a few minutes after the email alert. Here’s the email: This is the DrivePulse email alert I received… The other day I received two alerts that one of my backup drives (named “4TB of backups”) was low on free space. I don’t know that I’ve seen this yet, but I believe it.Īnyway, since I wrote last week’s column, Drive Genius 5 alerted me to yet another disk-related issue I was having but didn’t know it, and then helped me resolve it before it caused problems. Then, it can alert me of physical or logical issues with any of my drives before things go to hell in a hand-basket.Īccording to Prosoft, Drive Genius 5 can even predict drive failure before it occurs. As I mentioned last week, Drive Genius’s DrivePulse real-time monitoring is its best feature (at least in my not-necessarily-humble opinion).Īs you may recall, Drive Genius’s DrivePulse monitors the health of all connected drives and detects potential data corruption.
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