THE BEST FOR PERFORMANCE (Diskeeper Home Edition)

Member Name: thingywhatsit

Product:	Diskeeper Home Edition
Date:	11/05/06 (329 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Discreet, reliable and dependable.

Disadvantages: None to my knowledge.

When I explained the merits of this program to some of my friends, many said they were happy that their defragmentation was done frequently enough to make it a reasonably fast process. Others asked me what the heck defragmentation was and I want to address on this review my response to both kinds of reader, i.e. Those that think they understand the process and those that know that they do not.

Why do you “defrag” and what does it mean ?

For the purpose of demonstration, I am going to try and simplify the process into ordinary everyday words. Imagine a room. It's perhaps an office. You have been writing letters, left the pen on the floor, the writing pad on a chair, the stamps in some obscure corner that is not easy to find. Then perhaps you read a book for a while and closed it, not marking where you finished reading. On top of the desk, perhaps there are piles of paper and the post it notes that have come unstuck and lie in a huge pile. In order to do any task in a room like this, you first have to sort out where things are. Otherwise everything that you attempt to do will be slower than it would be if your room was neat and tidy. A computer works almost like that room, and if you do not take care of your hard drive and use your defragmentation program to clean up the bits and pieces that scatter throughout its records, it too becomes slow.

So why have a different program to that provided by Windows XP?

Microsoft actually admit that the built in defragmenter in the windows system tools is weak, by promoting another one called PerfectDisk 7 which is optimized to give the best performance in cleaning up your hard disk. I actually tried this and Diskeeper, and of the two, my preference is for Diskeeper in that the layout was easy to understand and it actually seemed to work much faster than standard defragmenters, and could be set to work in the background, whilst I did other things. I would agree about what they say about the product in comparison with the standard defrag program built into Windows XP.

“Automatic defragmentation is the only way to keep your computer running fast. Manual defragmenters can¡¯t keep up and are incomplete. Diskeeper is the fastest and most recommended automatic defragmenter ever built.
Diskeeper 8.0 gives you a Real Defrag Solution!”

My experience.

I dislike defragmentation of my computer. It takes so much time with the standard Defrag program built in to XP, and the process can sometimes take hours. I started to look at alternatives on the Internet and came across Diskeeper and thought, because it offered me the opportunity of trying it before purchasing it, that I had little to lose.



Downloading the program was simple and took less than five minutes, although I was not keen on the fact that I had to give personal details upon taking out the trial, although I can understand that the makers want to be sure that members of the public don't just keep downloading it and never buy it I suppose, and other makers of programs have asked for similar information, so I was not unduly worried.

Having downloaded the program, the interesting part began. Defragmentation the first time around with my new gizmo actually took me a lot less time than I expected, at around quarter of an hour. You are shown right from the start how to use the tool, and for someone with limited technical knowledge, it was ideal. I didn't play with the settings and configuration because I assume that the pre-set ones are actually better than anything I could come up with.

What this program allows you to do is amazing. In the past, I would be forced to close every program and let the computer concentrate on the single task of defragmentation (or sorting out all the grey matter in my computer). This always irritated me, as women are accustomed to multi tasking, and I thought the XP built in program limited. The new thing about this program is that it can run in the background without stopping you from doing things, and that spoke chapters because they have obviously thought of people like me when designing the program.

I do rather like the options on this program as well, as you are able to watch the progress on a much clearer "at a glance" Volume Map, clearly explained with different colours having different meanings. At the end of the process, the program produces a comprehensive report as to the state of your defragmented files and also a section giving you advice about the health of your computer, which to my mind is very sensible. There is another section which shows graphs of the fragments eliminated and this section is rather reassuring and even to me shows that the program is actually achieving something.

What I also like about the program is that its designed in such a way as to give the user choice. You can manually defrag at any time you wish to, or you can "set it and forget it", and here it was easy to set up so that the defragmentation takes place every day, and runs in the background whilst I work on others things. So far, I would say that I have not noticed a difference in speed of my computer at all whilst defrag is taking place and this is marvellous. What was said here was that a manual defragmentor can never work as quickly and efficiently as an automatic one, and I believe this to be the case.

The version that I have is designed for Windows XP Home Edition and previous versions of Windows. There are other versions for more professional users that want to chose which area of their files they want to defrag, but for the home user, I would suggest that the Home Edition is ideal. It doesn't require any technical experience, and the instructions are so easily explained, even having a section with commonly regular questions and answers, written in such a way that they are helpful in explaining the whole process to me.

Once you have registered (after the trial period and payment of 23.95 GBP), you have the possibility of updates and from my experience so far, I have not found any updates necessary and have ticked a simple box so that updates are searched for once a week. Interestingly enough, I would actually recommend the program to people with laptops as well as desktop computers, because they even thought of the fact that some users will be dependent upon the use of batteries for power, and here, they have a clever option that the user can chose, whereby automatic defragmentation does not take place whilst the computer is powered by battery, thus preserving the precious time that a user is away from a power supply. I think this really is well thought out. A user is also able to chose which files they do not wish to defrag, although here, to be honest, my knowledge of which files do not need it is limited, and I trust the program to defrag everything. The program also allows you to chose if you wish to keep data from defragmentation to compare performance and generate reports that are easy to read and understand.

I am rather impressed with both the performance and speed of this program, and honestly feel that it takes account of people that do not have hours when they can leave the computer turned on defragmentising. Mine is rather noisy, and I would certainly not wish to defrag at night, but also do not want to be restricted in my use of the computer whilst the defrag works.

This is a worthwhile program and one that I enjoy using. The help files are superb and explain both use of the program and queries that a user may have. Executive Software got it right, and I am convinced that many users will forget about the built in defrag on Windows XP, and try this.

I hope this helps someone with their choice. My computer is faster. My defrag is easier, and at last, my computer thinks like a woman and can multi-task, almost as fast as I can !

Rachel

Summary: Super easy program that doesn't take up too much space at 11.49 MB

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