Is your hard drive slowing down as you use it more? Do you download a lot
of files and tend to delete stuff frequently? If so, then your hard drive is
most likely "fragmented." Think of it as a deck of cards. When they
are in order, everything is easy to find, but once shuffled it takes longer to
find cards. The same is true for your hard drive. The more it is used, the
more files you have, the greater the shuffling or fragmentation. To optimize
your system you need a defragmentation tool.
Now I don't know about you, but I've tried a few products and have been
very frustrated by them. First, they tend not to like anything else running in
the background like virus checking programs. Second, they tend to be
rather unintuitive for the average user. You're never really sure if
they are working. Luckily, Diskeeper
is a horse of a different color. Not only is it friendly to your system, it is
also user-friendly.
We installed Diskeeper
on both a Windows 98 and a Windows 2000 system. Installation was quick and
painless. Once launched on our 2000 system, we set it to analyze our 60 MB
drive, and soon saw the familiar "mosaic" snapshot of our drive. It
wasn't pretty. Lots of fragmented files resulting in slower than desired
performance.
After the analysis, Diskeeper
told us in plain English that "free space is so low that performance is
suffering from that fact alone. Indeed, fragmentation is the least of your
worries under these conditions." Well, it seems Diskeeper
even has a bit of an edge to its analysis. It suggested we delete some files
and free a minimum of 20% of our disk space. We did, and performance started
getting better. Then we ran Diskeeper
again and it defragged our drive in no time improving performance even more.
On our Windows 98 system we let Diskeeper
do its job. And thanks to its intelligent "Set It and Forget It"
option, it runs quietly in the background monitoring the level of
fragmentation and improving performance whenever the system needs it. It
doesn't ask me to shut off my virus checking program or my memory manager or
any of my other tools running in the background. In fact, Diskeeper
just does its job and doesn't complain at all. It 's easy to see why Diskeeper
is at the top of its class. You can download a trial by clicking here.
Diskeeper
