By Terry Currier
If you believe that “time is money” than this is money well
spent. Remember those long period of times while you waited for your defragging
to get
done. Even worse you had to boot into safe mode so it would complete.
Microsoft provides Windows users with a defragging utility, for free. So why
spend money for the same thing? Because, it’s not the same thing. Executive
Software Diskeeper is faster, way faster then the defrag from Microsoft (which
is why it is free.)
The point of defragging is to get all your files together. It helps the computer by taking a shorter time to find all of the files it needs to work with. The program will even show you how much faster (percentage) it would be after defragging the fragmented files.
Even better you don’t have to sit on your hands while it
defrags. It uses a
patented high-speed multi-pass engine that runs 300-500%
faster than the Windows free defragmenter. Yet it can use so little resources
that you are able to still do work on the computer while it runs in the
background. In fact with the new 9.0 comes I/O Smart, which keeps scheduled
Diskeeper jobs from slowing down your system by backing off when any user
activity takes place
I have been copying my old vinyl records onto my computer. It takes a lot of time to do so, and a whole lot of disk space. Each song will take up about 35MB hard disk space. Then after that going through to edit, or even delete some songs it causes a lot of fragmentation. In fact when I checked my temp folder I had over 2,000 tmp files which I had to manually delete. Fragmentation of large files can cause the biggest slowdowns. Believe me defragging with the Microsoft defrag will work, but it will take a large part of the day. With Diskeeper I was able to do the defrag and start doing other things quickly.
If I wanted to I could use their “Set It and Forget It”
scheduling mode allowing up to two schedules per volume, including Screen Saver
and SmartScheduling™ modes.
SmartScheduling automatically schedules background defragmentation based
on individual usage patterns. You can also set exclusion times when the Smart
Scheduling option will be prevented from scheduling a defragmentation run. The
new File Performance defragmentation mode will actually defragment areas of the
disk that are causing the biggest slowdowns.
Their new FragShield help keeps your Master File Table (MFT) and Page File optimized. FragShield is comprised of two components: the MFT configuration tool and the paging file configuration tool. These tools allow you to set up your paging file(s) and MFT(s) such that fragmentation will be unlikely to occur in the future. After running FragShield once, data gathered by Diskeeper during future analysis and defragmentation jobs as well as data gathered periodically on paging file usage is used to determine if either configuration tool should be run again. They say in most cases, once these tools are run they will not be needed again.
The paging file is an area of a hard disk set aside to
temporarily hold data intended to reside in computer memory. As the operating
system needs
physical memory (RAM), it temporarily moves less-used data from
the RAM to the hard disk. Data is copied back and forth between the paging file
and the system memory as needed. This is known as “paging” or “swapping”. The
FragShield paging file configuration tool helps you set the paging file size
correctly and handles any fragmentation incurred during the process.
For laptop users, Diskeeper 9 has an improved Power Saving mode that suspends background defragmentation while the laptop is running on battery power.
Okay it’s not free but it does give you more free time, and what is that worth to you?
You can check out a 30 trial version at http://www.execsoft.com/
Diskeeper Home Edition ($29.50) and Professional Edition
System ($49.50) Requirements:
For use on any single computer running Windows XP (Home
Edition and Professional), 2000 Professional, ME, 98 and 95.
Diskeeper Professional Edition also supports Windows NT 4.0
Workstation.
File Systems Supported: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS
From our January 2005 newsletter
Membership in WINNERS is $20 annually for individuals with $5 for each additional family member. The newsletter is emailed to the members in PDF format.
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Winners is a member of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG) is an international, platform-independent, nonprofit corporation (incorporated in Washington, DC) devoted to helping user groups throughout the world. Almost 400 user groups are members of APCUG. http://www.apcug.net/ |