I. Admin:
With no advance shipping notice, my DW 4.0 arrived 12/11/06 via priority mail (ordered when first announced).
The CD comes in a thin polyurethane case, rather than a paper sleeve.
The CD cover is printed with the owner’s serial number (but not his name).
As before, if one is going to install (drag & drop) DW, Alsoft recommends it be in the Utilities folder.
I have yet to read the documentation, so what constraints, if any, there may be re running DW on a network, I dunno.
II. Technical (on a 24” Intel iMac and on a G4 DP 800, both 10.4.
:
Before installing, I used FileBuddy to find and remove all DW 3.x files, including the invisible ones. What, if any difference this makes, I dunno.
As suggested, I first started up from the DW (install) CD—a very long process.
My first run (on the 24” iMac) revealed 35% of the items were out of order and a few creation dates needed repair. I suspect (guess) that the high number of items out of order had to do with my using Migration Assistant, performing an Archive & Install, and numerous system updaters…
DW then did it’s thang as expected, but much faster.
Subsequent runs revealed no problems.
I have since installed DW on all volumes, including a FW external drive, and DW was able to verify/repair all other volumes, excluding the boot drive of course.
Journaling was not affected, e.g., it remained in its enabled state.
Just how well DW resolves major directory problems, I dunno.
III. Conclusion:
At first glance, it looks like another great product from Alsoft.
FWIW:
I was at my local Apple VAR 12/13/06 talking with one of the service techs. He noted that he had a 12” PB (I don’t know what model) that had a badly corrupted directory and for the last 6 days and nights, DW 3.x had been running in an effort to resurrect the directory. Finally, the tech quit DW 3.x.
DW 4.0 had just arrived, so he gave that a try. Three hours later the customer’s PB was back in service.
As Zapom noted, it is much, much faster.
