Auslogics Defragmenter 2.0
It’s getting less and less often that freeware for the Windows operating system stays free. The trend I’m seeing is to update the software, then make it shareware or incredibly annoying nagware.
Auslogics must be doing well with their paid products (which you should take a look at, out of courtesy), because the Disk Defragmenter has been steadily improving with each incremental release.
The 2.0 release brings the ability to schedule defragmentations of one or more drives and walk away, an upgraded interface, considerably more pleasant that what it was, and improved choice of how the defragmentation takes place. By the way, this works on both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows.
Now I’m not saying that those of you who are used to Diskeeper, from Executive Software (I forgot, name change) Diskeeper Corporation should throw away your copies of that software, but for those not wanting to fork over the $45 for Diskeeper 2009, this is fairly nice stuff. No complaints from my drives or me.
from their site
Why Defragment Disks?
Hard disks are by far the slowest component in your computer. CPU and memory work much faster than hard disks because they do not have moving parts. Therefore fragmented disks often become a bottleneck of the system performance.
Besides causing slowdowns, fragmentation makes the disk drive heads move too much when reading files which leads to freeze-ups and system crashes. It is important to keep your disks defragmented and optimized as much as possible.
Auslogics Disk Defrag was designed to remedy system sluggishness and crashes caused by disk fragmentation. It is optimized to work with today’s modern hard disks. Auslogics Disk Defrag is extremely simple to use, does not require any analysis phase and is faster than most of the other disk defragmentation software. It will help you get the maximum performance out of your expensive hardware investments. And, what’s most important, it’s absolutely free.
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Highly recommended. (only one small nit to pick – this will not move files to do what Diskeeper calls compress the volume, meaning moving the files together and making the very largest amount of free space contiguous – maybe in the next version)
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5 Comments
Tiger
May 22nd, 2009
at 3:06am
I do use Diskeeper [2009 Pro] on my systems, and it’s a wonderful defrag utility. As you can guess, I am not planning to switch to any other defragger any time soon, be it freeware or payware.
The main drawbacks with these freeware defraggers are a) no system files defrag and b) no shadow copy protection in Vista. Both of these are deal breakers for me. Besides Diskeeper’s automatic defrag mode is just too good …set and forget forever :)
Joe Abusamra
May 22nd, 2009
at 4:47am
Many would take exception to the comment on free space consolidation being a “small nit.” It is generally recognized that free space consolidation is as important as defragmenting the files to maximize a drive’s performance. There are many other considerations that evaluators look into which are important, which is why non-freeware solutions such as PerfectDisk continue to be used by millions of consumers and businesses.
Joe Abusamra
Raxco Software, Inc.
http://www.perfectdisk.com
http://www.perfectdiskblog.com
the oracle
May 22nd, 2009
at 5:22am
Tiger, I did not say the product was perfect, nor did I claim that systems with servers [shadow copy] would be well served, but for single machines – it is a viable solution.
I use Diskeeper too – but I’ve stopped upgrading after the 2007 versions, as the upgraded feature set is not worth it for me.
Besides that, the ability to really control where files will be stored, like that available in the old Norton products, is missing from ALL defraggers now, certainly because of the extended time it would take to defrag a drive, but for those with smaller volumes, and patience, it would be nice.
the oracle
May 22nd, 2009
at 5:25am
Joe Abusamra, there will always be a need for better solutions.
I have never tried your product, as I became a Diskeeper user long ago. However, if it provides more of the fine tuning that the old Norton products offered, I could easily be persuaded to change.
Does it?
Thanks for the comment.
Joe Abusamra
May 22nd, 2009
at 7:30am
Hi the oracle,
Thanks for the reply. Yes, it does have a lot of the things that the old Norton products had, and we have many ex-Norton and ex-Diskeeper users. There’s the free space consolidation and there’s a patented optimization strategy that arranges files on the drive according to usage, and reduces the ratge of fragmentation. There’s backgound processing, but also scheduling if desired.
We like to say at least give it a try for free and you’ll clean up your drive anyway even if you don’t buy it…:)
Thanks,
Joe