Drive Magic for Windows

This program promises to be your very own disk drive maid service: It'll clean up all the loose bits and broken bytes left in the free, unwritten areas of your drives and make them shine. Well, perhaps not shine, but Drive Magic 5 does promise to clean any file residue left behind by Windows' notorious deletion process.

The interface is easy to follow, although the X icon for Sanitize can be a bit confusing, since it's the same as the Delete icon in Windows Explorer. Drive Magic does not delete anything from your hard drive. However, the cleaning process is slow, even on the fastest and least-intrusive setting. It took nearly an hour to scrub an 80 GB drive. The trial version is limited. It will only clean a drive labeled A, B, or C, so you can't easily clean external devices. The full version has five settings: basic, simple, secure, ultimate, and custom. There are also basic logging options and password protection.

Overall, the program interface is decent enough. Whether Drive Magic does as it promises or is just a glorified disk defragmenter is hard to discern.