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- Average user rating: stars out of 52 votes Back to product review
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2 out of 3 people found this review helpful
3 stars
Version: R-Wipe & Clean 6
"A good program with some irritations"
Pros: I reviewed a previous version of this product. That version crashed my system when I tried to wipe the free space on my harddrive. The current version has not yet crashed my system.
The product has always been easy to use. It does an excellent job of cleaning up your internet traces.
It takes about an hour to wipe the 68 Gig of free space on my pc using their psuedo random algorithm. I don't really know if this is faster than competing products, I haven't benchmarked it, but it seems entirely acceptable to me.
Customer support responded to my email within 24 hours with an understandable answer.
I wound up buying the product. I'm fairly satisfied so far.
Cons: I can only assume that R-Wipe does NOT wipe slack space. I cannot find any mention of slack space in the Help File nor in any reviews. I believe that "unused space" is an entire unused cluster. I believe slack space is the unused space on a partially used cluster. I admit I am not certain about this. Depending on your need for security, you might want to investigate this more.
One irritating thing is that the program has a message that pops up when your download is more than 3 months old. Then you tell it when you want it to remind you again. There is no way to turn off the reminder permanently.
The EULA states that you can install this product on one and only one PC at a time. So if you have a laptop too, you must buy another copy.
The program does not wipe application traces from the "Dell Image Expert Application", which I found disappointing. If you hope R-Wipe will clean up after a specific application that you currently use, verify it is on their list.
For a while, I thought that "Wipe Lists" would allow me to wipe traces from applications that are not supported by R-Wipe. They do not. The help file was not very useful in my attempts to gather more info.
- 2 replies to this review
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you did a very good write up
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I don't know what version you ran, but R-Wipe & Clean 6.0 build 1238 claims that it wipes slack space (it refers to them as "cluster tips").
(Actually, the web site says it's version 6.0, but the About box says 6.5. I don't know which is correct.)
By the way, using a forensic disk-analysis tool, I tested whether or not R-Wipe & Clean actually did overwrite cluster tips, and it does NOT appear to at all. I gathered all existing slack space before and after writing, on a clean WinXP install. Before AND after wiping, most of the slack space consisted of 00s, rather than being filled with pseudo-random data, which is how I had R-Wipe & Clean configured to behave. So, in other words, the product failed to overwrite the slack space. (I guess they don't think anyone knows how to check these things.)
And you can also wipe custom files, folders, and registry keys/values. This is done using the "Wipe Lists" item found at the bottom of either the bar view or the tree view of the main window. Once you find it, it's self-explanatory. So yes, you can wipe objects that belong to applications not covered natively by R-Wipe & Clean, but you have to add the objects yourself.
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