To answer your last point first, Eraser is open source, that is it always was and always will be free. The 'stable' version 6.0.7 is the current release. The nightly builds are development versions of a further 6.0 service release (which may or may not see the light of day), and builds (not yet feature complete, hence the 6.1 designation) of the next planned full release (6.2). Stability of nightly builds is not guaranteed, but the most recent (at the time of writing) are running as well as 6.0.7 on my machines. But, when a tiny, minimally resourced team develops a program for open source release, it is inevitable that users will identify issues that the development team are unaware of.
As with a lot of programs these days, Help|About is closed just by clicking on it.
The speed of a free space erase is a primarily a function of 4 things:
- drive technology, which is a significant limiting factor;
- the amount of free space to be erased;
- the erasing method (particularly the number of passes) chosen;
- what else is running concurrently on the computer (erasing needs as much hard drive bandwidth as it can get).
It is not, typically, a function of the speed of the Eraser program itself. Based on the performance of my quad core Vista machine, I would expect your erase to complete in 4-6 hours, if you are using the default single pass erase method (which, in my opinion, is perfectly satisfactory for erasing free space), and are not trying to do anything else concurrently (switching off your antivirus usually helps as well). If you are already doing these things, I'd check that your USB connection has not reverted to USB 1.1, which for some reason can happen on occasions.
David
