Version 5.8
- Thread starter rarebear
- Start date
Version 6 ('stable' build 1376) does not seem to work at all under Windows 7 x64. I haven't tried that build on Vista.
Recent nightly builds (I'm currently using 6.1.0.1880) are better; from my experience, Joel is right to claim that they are much more stable. There are still issues, but mostly these are issues of Windows errors which Eraser deals with less than elegantly.
Clearly, a nightly build cannot be as thoroughly tested as a service release (hence the honest health warning), but I have no reason to believe that the Eraser engine is not working as advertised in the newer builds.
From my attempts to run 5.8 under Vista, I'd hesitate to advise anyone to run it under any OS later than XP SP3; it runs into all the Windows security issues that Version 6 is progressively addressing, and so also comes with a health warning. In all of this, it is worth remembering that the main reason for moving to the new (and evolving) version of Eraser is that Microsoft moved the goalposts.
In circumstances under which no version of Eraser is at present as complete and stable under Vista and Windows 7 as 5.x was under XP, my advice would be to stick with 5.x for XP, but move to Version 6 (the new version, or a nightly build until it appears) for Vista and Windows 7.
David
Recent nightly builds (I'm currently using 6.1.0.1880) are better; from my experience, Joel is right to claim that they are much more stable. There are still issues, but mostly these are issues of Windows errors which Eraser deals with less than elegantly.
Clearly, a nightly build cannot be as thoroughly tested as a service release (hence the honest health warning), but I have no reason to believe that the Eraser engine is not working as advertised in the newer builds.
From my attempts to run 5.8 under Vista, I'd hesitate to advise anyone to run it under any OS later than XP SP3; it runs into all the Windows security issues that Version 6 is progressively addressing, and so also comes with a health warning. In all of this, it is worth remembering that the main reason for moving to the new (and evolving) version of Eraser is that Microsoft moved the goalposts.
In circumstances under which no version of Eraser is at present as complete and stable under Vista and Windows 7 as 5.x was under XP, my advice would be to stick with 5.x for XP, but move to Version 6 (the new version, or a nightly build until it appears) for Vista and Windows 7.
David
DemonEyesBob
New Member
You could always do some basic checks. Erase stuff and then try using a recovery program to find it. My experience (in the last couple of days) has been that 5.8.8 works a lot better on win7 x86 then the stable 6 release (which, while it doesn't crash, doesn't actually erase for me).rarebear said:
I used 5.8.8 US DOD 3pass option on my unused disk space and it worked almost perfectly - Recuva went from being able to recover 98% of the 2,000 files it found to being able to recover about 100 files out of the 25,000 files it found after Eraser had run (almost all 25K being the lovely long named 0KB files Eraser makes). Most of the files it still found and could recover were temp files created or locked during the Eraser run, and so expected to be problematic.
Joel
Active Member
"Stable" in versioning doesn't mean the program won't crash. Windows RTMs and Service Packs are "stable" releases but it doesn't mean there are no bugs. "Stable" just means the code won't change as much as a "beta", "alpha" or "development" build and is indicative of completeness more than the actual code's ability to work.