Have you actually run recent versions of Diskeeper or PerfectDisk? They may
not display as pretty a drive map, or display defrag progress as smoothly,
but they do cause a noticeable performance change on the PCs they run on. I
know because I've used all three (including Speedisk which is very poor for
W2k and XP).
| I w98, most defrager's were implimented as special device drivers, and
| they defrag'd the drive directly, bypassing the OS; as such they could
| do virtually anything they wanted -- they were fast, and complete.
| SpeedDisk under w98 did a very complete job, moving dir's up front and
| sorting all files on the disk in directory order. It even sorted the
| dir's themselves.
|
| Under XP, there is a new MS-Approved Defragmenting API [ie, software
| routines] within the OS itself that all the XP defrager's use. These
| routines are designed to be "safe", but not fast. They work on NTFS or
| FAT drivers. But they are limited to simply defraging a file, nothing
| more - no dir sort, no optimization. [Most boot-time defrager's can move
| the dirs to the front of the drive, and they can defrag the page file and
| the MFT].
|
| As a result, under XP defraggers are "not as good as" they used to be!
| But they have MS's blessing now.
|
| Diskeeper and PerfectDisk are generally considered the best choices
| available. SpeedDisk under XP is ok too, and is DOES support some
| "optimizations" [you can specify files-first and files-last]; it
| does not have a boot-time defrager, its major failing [Symantec
| says it's working on it]. None of them are very fast.
|
| I Wish Symantec would bring the old SpeedDisk Driver Version up to date;
| even if it means booting to a special OS and running it stand-alone,
| I miss the all-encompassing optimization that it performed. And damn
| it was fast!
|