Whats the best defragger for WinXP?

[Ian Roberts]

Hi

I'm thinking of improving upon the basic built Defragger offered by MS.

I know there's a defragger in Norton Utilities and there's Diskeeper v9.
There was also a shareware one (I think) that had a good rep but I cant
recall the name.

Any views on which is best?

Thanks

Ian I^)

 

[Michael Cecil]

Hi

I'm thinking of improving upon the basic built Defragger offered by MS.

I know there's a defragger in Norton Utilities and there's Diskeeper v9.
There was also a shareware one (I think) that had a good rep but I cant
recall the name.

Any views on which is best?

Thanks

Ian I^)

PerfectDisk > O&O Defrag >> Norton Speeddisk >>>>> Diskeeper ~ MS default

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

I'm thinking of improving upon the basic built Defragger offered by MS.

I know there's a defragger in Norton Utilities and there's Diskeeper v9.
There was also a shareware one (I think) that had a good rep but I cant
recall the name.

Any views on which is best?

What improvements are you looking for? Outside of scheduling, there
isn't too much extra in most 3rd party defraggers. Speed isn't
dramatically different, and isn't much of an issue if run in the
background or non-use times.

I've used Diskeeper for years. They've had Smart scheduling (checking
defrag level, then scheduling based on how fragmented it is) for awhile,
and DK8 (and presumably 9), let you exclude hours so it doesn't start up
when you are typically using it. I just found out about DK9, and most of
the 'updates' are no big deal. In fact, I think the 'new' FragShield
used to exist under the name FragGuard a few years ago!! MFT
fragmentation typically only occurs if you nearly fill up your drive,
and pagefile fragmentation when you increase your pagefile size.

 

[Tom]

I've used Diskeeper for years.

The funny thing about Diskeeper is that it agrees with Norton Speed
Disk, though Norton Speed disagrees with Diskeeper. Meaning, even
Diskeeper thinks Norton did a better job of defragging the drive.

Norton Speed Disk also has a big bad bug that will kill access to the
drive if certain options and drives are selected at the wrong time. Not
to mention that semi-important options have been removed in the WinXP
versions that are still there if installed on Win98se. It appears that
Symantec has all but abandon any future updates.

Since I don't really care for Norton Speed Disk or Diskeeper, I'm giving
PerfectDisk a try. So far, so good. YMMV.

 

[CJT]

Hi

I'm thinking of improving upon the basic built Defragger offered by MS.

I know there's a defragger in Norton Utilities and there's Diskeeper v9.
There was also a shareware one (I think) that had a good rep but I cant
recall the name.

Any views on which is best?

Thanks

Ian I^)

The best is to keep your files on Linux and serve them up via Samba.
Then you don't need to defrag.

;-)

 

[Timothy Daniels]

I'm thinking of improving upon the basic built
Defragger offered by MS.

I know there's a defragger in Norton Utilities and
there's Diskeeper v9. There was also a shareware
one (I think) that had a good rep but I cant
recall the name.

Any views on which is best?

Eet don' mahtter, mon. One of the PC magazines
did a defragger review about a year ago, and the
conclusion was that the Norton one took grossly
too long for negligable extra gain, the rest took
less time but not worth the cost, and MS's built-in
defragger was good enough. In fact, the article
opined that with WinXP, defragging wasn't worth
doing as the operating system seemed to take care
of itself. Bottom line - spend your time and your
money on something else, like more RAM. If you
want to read it yourself, check out the archives at the
PCmag and PCWorld websites. BTW, if you have
a 2nd drive with another copy of a MS operating
system loaded, boot that one and use it to defrag
the 1st drive. Defrags seem to go faster if one
hard drive defrags the other.

*TimDaniels*

 

[Dave Balcom]

}Since I don't really care for Norton Speed Disk or Diskeeper, I'm giving
}PerfectDisk a try. So far, so good. YMMV.

I have been using PerfectDisk for a couple of years now and have not had
any problems... <knock on wood>

 

[Tom]

}Since I don't really care for Norton Speed Disk or Diskeeper, I'm
}giving PerfectDisk a try. So far, so good. YMMV.

I have been using PerfectDisk for a couple of years now and have not
had any problems... <knock on wood>

In just the past day I've found several things I like about PerfectDisk
over Norton Speed Disk.

Probably the most important is allowing a nearly full drive to be
defragmented. Speed Disk under WinXP will NOT allow a partition to be
defragmented if there is not enough free space. Yet under Win98se the
same drive and version of Speed Disk would allow the defragmentation to
start. I just finished defragmenting a 55.9GB partition with as little
as 114MB free. Impossible with Speed Disk under WinXP.

However, there are a few things that could be improved. I don't like the
way the drive monitor works when working with multiple drives. I think
if more then one drive is selected it should show multiple results when
they finish. Either by using tabs on a single notification window or
multiple notification windows representing each drive.

PerfectDisk shouldn't allow you to multi-select drives for the analyser
without showing you all the results of the selected drives when they
finish.

There are some display refresh glitches. I nearly took a dump when half
the drive showed as being free space after switching the monitor to a
different drive and then switching back. It wasn't until the progression
gauge updated that the drive monitor layout displayed the missing blue
blocks and I could breath again.

The help file could use some improvements. I still don't understand what
it means when the analyser finishes and recommends both:

Boot/Offline Defragmentation

SmartPlacement Defragmentation

If you don't mind, could explain what this means? I understand about
locking the drive for offline, but do I boot defrag, offline defrag
and/or just use defragment button and select SmartPlacement? And why the
need manually select, shouldn't the program figure this out?

 

[Paul Busby]

In just the past day I've found several things I like about
PerfectDisk over Norton Speed Disk.

Probably the most important is allowing a nearly full drive to be
defragmented. Speed Disk under WinXP will NOT allow a partition to be
defragmented if there is not enough free space. Yet under Win98se the
same drive and version of Speed Disk would allow the defragmentation
to start. I just finished defragmenting a 55.9GB partition with as
little as 114MB free. Impossible with Speed Disk under WinXP.

However, there are a few things that could be improved. I don't like
the way the drive monitor works when working with multiple drives. I
think if more then one drive is selected it should show multiple
results when they finish. Either by using tabs on a single
notification window or multiple notification windows representing
each drive.

PerfectDisk shouldn't allow you to multi-select drives for the
analyser without showing you all the results of the selected drives
when they finish.

There are some display refresh glitches. I nearly took a dump when
half the drive showed as being free space after switching the monitor
to a different drive and then switching back. It wasn't until the
progression gauge updated that the drive monitor layout displayed the
missing blue blocks and I could breath again.

The help file could use some improvements. I still don't understand
what it means when the analyser finishes and recommends both:

Boot/Offline Defragmentation

SmartPlacement Defragmentation

If you don't mind, could explain what this means? I understand about
locking the drive for offline, but do I boot defrag, offline defrag
and/or just use defragment button and select SmartPlacement? And why
the need manually select, shouldn't the program figure this out?

I chose Perfect Disk 3yrs ago over DK & O&O because it could recognise XP's
own Prefetch defrag process & had loads of commandline parameters for
running in Task Scheduler. the others have probably caught up in many
respects. The only problem I ever had was refusal to offline defrag my boot
partition & that was fixed by returning to an earlier build before PD was
upgraded - still using it now. PD also seemed to lower the rate of
refragmentation.

As for Smart Placement - it defrags files & free space based on when files
were last changed. Offline defrag will attempt to lock a partition from the
rest of Windows & if it can't, will do it on the next boot. If you look at
the defrag log, Fragmented files, will probably show certain files that
begin with $ which are so-called meta files (with NTFS) or files such as
hiberfil.sys or the pagefile that which have possibly been forced to
increase size into fragmented space.

You must have a later version than me that actually recommends an offline
pass if required, mine doesn't (2000 v5.0 b35) thought it's easy enough to
check manually.

Regards

 

[Winey]

The funny thing about Diskeeper is that it agrees with Norton Speed
Disk, though Norton Speed disagrees with Diskeeper. Meaning, even
Diskeeper thinks Norton did a better job of defragging the drive.

Norton Speed Disk also has a big bad bug that will kill access to the
drive if certain options and drives are selected at the wrong time. Not
to mention that semi-important options have been removed in the WinXP
versions that are still there if installed on Win98se. It appears that
Symantec has all but abandon any future updates.

I would say that your Symantec comment appears to apply to all of the
old Norton Utilities. Speeddisk is very slow on large drives. The
GUI for the Unerase Wizard is pretty bad and it seems unchanged for
years and years now.

Symantec is busy trying to reposition itself away from utilities and
towards security. Not "consumer" but "enterprise" security, but to
their chagrin, consumers keep buying the AV product, lowering the % of
revenue from corporations.

My guess is that they are putting most of their development $$$ into
security these days. At first glance, I can't figure out whey they
bought PowerQuest, since it probably would have been cheaper to fix
Ghost internally than to buy PQ just to "fix Ghost."

ISTR a comment (usenet? ) that Norton's registry repair routine is not
as good as others available, and is potentially dangerous because some
of the changes it makes.

All in all, I had a good "run" with Norton Utilities, but it seem time
to look for individual best-of-breed utilities elsewhere.

And a pre-emptive phoeey%$%$phoeey to EG, RR, FR and all the other
self-appointed guardians of the pflame of pure knowledge.

 

[Ian Roberts]

Hi

I'm thinking of improving upon the basic built Defragger offered by MS.

I know there's a defragger in Norton Utilities and there's Diskeeper v9.
There was also a shareware one (I think) that had a good rep but I cant
recall the name.

Any views on which is best?

Thanks

Ian I^)

Hi Everyone

Thanks a lot for all your replies

Yes Perfect Disc is the name of the one I had forgotton. Looks like thats
the one for me.

I tried a demo of Diskeeper but this insisted on needing 20% free space
before it would do anything - which is a complete pain when most of my
partitions had much less. And keeping 20% of a 120Gb partition free just
for this to work is a complete waste of space! Mad!

NU has been stagnant for years and there are numerous (better/faster)
alternatives now so its really lost its appeal and value.

Thanks again

Ian I^)

 

[davexnet02]

Diskeeper appears to be absolutely useless on fat32.
I have been given a copy of 9.0, I installed it and
have since uninstalled.
It's operation seems brain dead. An analyze, told be
I had 10 small files that were fragmented.
I set the method to "quick", but still it insists on
shuffling over files that are are already fragmented,
pushing them all over a few bytes to the left
and it's completely ignoring (after 30 minutes of running)
the small amount of fragmented files that were there.

I don't understand this operation at all. It's certainly not
"quick defragmentation"


Dave

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

Diskeeper appears to be absolutely useless on fat32.
I have been given a copy of 9.0, I installed it and
have since uninstalled.
It's operation seems brain dead. An analyze, told be
I had 10 small files that were fragmented.
I set the method to "quick", but still it insists on
shuffling over files that are are already fragmented,
pushing them all over a few bytes to the left
and it's completely ignoring (after 30 minutes of running)
the small amount of fragmented files that were there.

I don't understand this operation at all. It's certainly not
"quick defragmentation"

I agree that Diskeeper's FAT support is horrible. It's very basic. It
just shuffles files over, filling in gaps and shifing files over.
Diskeeper is much more NTFS oriented.

Unless you dual boot, there is little need for FAT-style partitions.
They have no security, limit individual files to 4G, and have giant
cluster sizes.

 

[davexnet02]

I agree that Diskeeper's FAT support is horrible. It's very basic. It
just shuffles files over, filling in gaps and shifing files over.
Diskeeper is much more NTFS oriented.

Unless you dual boot, there is little need for FAT-style partitions.
They have no security, limit individual files to 4G, and have giant
cluster sizes.

Thanks for backing up my finding.
I do have dual boot, so for now, I'm keeping it fat32.
9gb partition, acceptable 8k cluster size.

There's still plenty of people using fat32.
The people at diskeeper development have,
because of this issue, provided an incomplete solution.

I'm not going to run it; I'll stick with XP's built in
solution.

Dave

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

I'm not going to run it; I'll stick with XP's built in
solution.

Just a note that MS's defragger is just a cut-down version of
Diskeeper.