What's your disk Defragmenter?

Did you read my first post in this Topic?

 

Yes, but I got the impression from your later post that you later changed your mind in favor of PD.

Btw, UD allows you to enable a boot-time defrag (see Tools>Options).

 

I know, but I don't see any change when set it...

 

Hi guys,

I'm 'trialing' a few defraggers and to be honest I haven't been able to notice any discernable difference in my system's performance after using eaach of them (1-week apart from one another)! ButI will say that I like the visual display of UD the best, as it shows where it's placing files on the disk in a better manner than the others do.

 

I was wondering about that too, especially since you don't see any defragging dialog during bootup. However, after enabling it my stopwatch indicated that it took an additional 6-sec to bootup, so I presumed that UD's defrag was the reason for that.

 

For sure, UD's display is very cool.

As far as not seeing any performance improvement, that may be because your disk just wasn't all that defragmented. I read somewhere that unless your disk is more than 5% fragmented, you won't notice any benefit after defragging.

On the other hand, there's performance to be gained not only from consolidation, but also from strategic file placement. So that's another factor to think about before degragging (in order to optimize your system's performance).

 

Diskeeper 9 pro.

 

O&O Defrag Pro v4.0 on W2K SP4

I use it because I purchased it 5 years ago and its done the job
at the time the defrag by name, date, access options were quite advanced
(same with preboot MFT, pagefile, registry)

Im interested in UltimateDefrag, but its unavailable for W2K SP4
(which is silly considering its basically the same thing as XP pro)

also use sysinternal's contig

 

Following all the favorable comments about UltimateDefrag I gave it a go and I'm sorry but I can't see what all the fuss is about. The visuals are different and amusing but of little importance. Speed compared to PerfectDisk 8 is slow. If UD is still in the early stages of development then fine but I can see no reason to remove PD 8 at this time.

 

That extra time is to show the dialog during bootup...

You have to see what UD offers to see the differences between them.
With UD you can place the files whenever you what and choose the way to optimize it. With PD you can't, i.e. you only have one strategy.
So you just have read a little bit of their features, and then decide what is the best for you.

 

Exactly - I have no real interest in playing with different strategies which have little or no impact on performance that I can see. PD8 does its job and it does it quickly which is the important point to me.

 

Using mst Defrag and loving it. No hassle. Support is very good too.

 

PerfectDisk user here.

 

Diskeeper Home defrags once a day and then continues to defrag in the background, unnoticed by the user. Immediately after bootup it kicks in and takes a few seconds to complete. I have simple needs so I don't care about stratagies, just as long as the HD stays defragged.

 

PerfectDisk for several years. Works great and is fast after your first SmartDefrag.

It's also cheap if you sign up for the yearly maintenance (~$6 per year and you get all upgrades, including new versions).

 

#12 JKDefrag here. I think OP recommended. I tend to change. But stuck on this one for now.

 

Really?

 

I ask Mark about this, and he says that contig.exe only defragments files and folders and it didn't defragments and optimizes the whole drives, and that we need to use a third party defragmenter to improve hd performance.

Rejor's PowerDeframenter GUI together w contig.exe has a power mode options wherein after the contig.exe first runs then there's another second run of defragmentations that uses the windows built-in defragmenter. And it does its job fast, faster than windows built-in defragger.

 

PerfectDisk 7. What does 8 have that 7 does not? Thanks.

Acadia

 

What's new in PerfectDisk 8.0?

 

Please advice about new defragger.

I'm seeking for advice about a new defragger.

Currently I'm using Norton Speed Disk from Norton Utilities 2000 (v4.5). This version cannot be installed in Windows XP, but I have installed both wXP-SP1 and w98SE following the method recommended by Microsoft (at least two logical disk drives C: and D:, install w98 in D:, then install wXP in C: ). FAT32 of course. I have only one physical disk divided in several partitions.

The major improvement that I got from the originally poor XP's disk performance (regarding both speed-few head travels and low fragmentation) didn't come from any defragging tool, but from the so called "Windows Prefetch Clean and Control" freeware. I like that about "prefetch clean" . I'll treat this in another post.

After defragging XP's partition from win98, this OS cannot boot. The fix is Partition Magic: any change to C: (such as reducing its size some little, leaving the space unallocated) will turn it bootable again (actually I always do two changes: first the mentioned size reduction of C:, then the opposite operation to leave it as it was).

(The final touch is to manually copy, under win98, a HIBERFIL.SYS file filled with zeroes over the real HIBERFIL.SYS that C: has, to reduce the size of partition backups that I make from time to time and before risky operations; I love the free and full of resources win9x style ).

(Well, I don´t know all of the details about why things happen here this way, so I cannot guarantee that they should be the same with any other similar system).

I had decided to install both w98SE and wXP-SP1 for other reasons: better compatibility with some old programs, and w98SE tends to be more confortable and even faster for some tasks. But I have installed a new hw part, a graphics card, without w98 driver, so I have installed those ancient programs under XP anyway and I would like to uninstall win98 itself, but after having a similar (and simpler and more secure) method to defrag.

So I want to defrag offline, all the files and the free space in the same operation. Besides this, my main condition is to be able to specify files to be moved (and defragged) to the beginning of the partition. I would concretely specify HIBERFIL.SYS and PAGEFILE.SYS in this order (I'm usually doing it with Norton Speed Disk 2000). Combined with the mentioned "Windows Prefetch Clean and Control", this avoids fragmentation of these files and a lot of the rest of the files and the free space.

I would also like it to be as simple as possible, as little intrusive as possible and as cheap as possible.

Any suggestion?

 

About XP's Prefetch feature.

"Prefetch" is an XP feature designed to speed up loading from disk, by reading in advance to "the cache"... but what cache? Other part of the disk? (I never understood this point well). Actually (at least in my case) its practical effect was being to generate a lot of disk traffic itself. "Cleaning" it with the "Windows Prefetch Clean and Control" freeware reduced head travels and improved speed. The program has several options:

- Disable Prefetch. This would lead to a 9x-style disk management.

- Monitor Application And Boot File Launch. This is the XP default.

- Monitor Boot File Launch Only. This is the one recommended by the authors and the one that gave best results in my system (the "disable prefetch" gave similar results after boot but showed clearly worse at boot time, it seems that XP's prefetch is a very valid technique to speed up booting).

- Monitor Application Launch Only. Just to give all options, I suppose, but if excluding app launch from prefetch mechanism gave the best results, this one should be the worst.

Disabling prefetching of apps gave me two benefits:

- Faster loading and less heads travelling.
- Less fragmentation, specially of the free space.

Actually, the option "disable prefetch" gave better results in this latter aspect, but I preferred the superior boot up performance of "monitor boot file launch only".

 

I have a snapshot with prefetching and a snapshot without prefetching. I don't see or feel the difference and my watch doesn't show nanoseconds, only seconds.
I also have a snapshot without security softwares and a snapshot with security softwares and that makes a big difference. The snapshot without security softwares works alot FASTER.

 

It is faster in what? I/O intensive apps., CPU/memory intensive apps or both?
Also, what security software are you running?