defrag help

i was wondering what is the best defragging program out there
i am especially interested in getting the boot files to the very front of the disk

something free would be awesome, but any suggestions would help thanks in advance

 

You can try Diskeeper v9.0. They have a free trial version available for download. It should be able to put all your boot files at the beginning of the drive.

http://www.diskeeper.com

-Vb-

 

ive got hte norton systemworks 2005, is the defragger in that any good?

 

I don't particularly care for systemworks. If you're wanting a good defrag program I have to agree with venom and say go with diskeeper. It's the best and fastest I've ever used, not all that pricey to buy for the home version, definitely worth the cost though.

 

You can use the systemworks defragger. Problem with Norton is that it is a resource hog, which is why most people don't like it. Plus several people have had problems uninstalling it.

If you don't mind norton using alot of your resources, then you could use it. I don't think it is the best defrag out there though.

SG

 

Norton does about a good a job as the windows built in defrag (which itsn't that bad either). The difference is Norton is a little faster. If you already have Norton go ahead and use it, but if your still shoping theres definitly better options. DiskKeeper is very good, as is O&O Defrag, and PerfectDisk. DiskKeeper has a slight edge over the others. But their main benefit is autodefragging - a sort of "set it and forget it" utility. They'll all do the boot defrag though.

 

does anyone know what exactly the boot time defrager option is?
and also where is the option to defrag the actual boot files so my system boots faster or does it do it automatically?

i bought the professional edition

 

Simply choose the set up a boot time defragmentation from the Set It and Forget It menu, this displays the scheduling menu where u can choose all your options like defrag the paging file which is a good idea to do regularly and the master file table. You can set it for the next manual reboot or set a specific time when you wont need to use your sytem since it can take a while on large drives if you have heavy fragmentation. Run a full defrag before you do the boot time to minimize the time it takes.

 

I actually just went through this. I ended up trying 3 of the 4 main defraggers and one small one, and I have to say that hands down Perfect Disk 7.0 was the best. The one I didn't try was Norton and that's because I read if you uninstall it it can cause weird problems with the disk or something like that. I agree though that there is a paucity of good comparisons reviews that actually look at benchmark improvement from highly fragmented drives in addition to time to defrag.

The three I tried were Diskeeper Pro, Perfect Disk and O&O.

Diskeeper is the enhanced Windows defragger. It failed to defrag the computer the same way each time so if you ran it once, and then again it would pretty much start over. There's also a paper on the Perfect Disk site that compares the 2 and shows that Diskeeper failed to improve the scores much despite 3 runs compared to Perfect Disks single run. Perfect Disk also listed more files on my computer that needed defragging than Diskeeper and Perfect Disk when I ran it after Diskeeper found things to defrag. To see if this was just a Perfect Disk/Diskeeper thing, I downloaded a shareware defragger someone mentioned once (I can't remember the name) and it found the same problems after the Diskeeper defrag.

O&O was also compared to Perfect Disk on the Perfect Disk site but they did an unfair comparison since they did the faster O&O run rather than the run that uses last accessed info the way Perfect Disk does. The problem that I had with O&O was that it took over 1/2 hour to analyze 20% of the disk on my very slow computer (800MHz) (i.e. it hadn't even started to defrag yet) and I lost patience with it. O&O claims there was an analysis of benchmarks by a German online paper that says it's better than Perfect Disk when it uses the access type defrag, but I couldn't find the article since I had trouble navigating in German.

Perfect Disk ran once and defragged it in such a way that when I ran it again it didn't need to touch a thing. I also ran the offline defrag twice, the first time it took overnight, the second time it didn't need to move anything again so was done in a couple of minutes which was all analysing the disk. Perfect Disk can also theoretically Defrag over the network.

The one drawback to Perfect Disk is that there isn't a pause button.

As you can tell, I ended up buying Perfect Disk. Ideally an unbiased third party would test the benchmarks the same way the Perfect Disk people did, but using the best settings for each system and using the exact same hard drive images the way they did. Unfortunately no one's really done it.

If you want to speed up the booting process then you can run bootvis which is separate from the defraggers.

Anyways, you should try all three for yourself and see. It'd be interesting to see if you come to the same conclusion.

 

Actually, I found that Raxco's PerfectDisk to be horrible. It defrag'd my HDD in a way that need to be defraged after being defragged. It seemed worse after the defrag. Pretty much like the Defrag that's built into Windows. I've also tried O&O way back and I also had issue with the defrag quality. Personally, I'd stick with Diskeeper Pro.

-Vb-

 

well damn now i have both installed and defragged using both once...how can i tell which did a better job
what are the mods/ experienced user's opinions between the two
...diskeeper pro and perfect disk

 

There is a tool called tuneXP, that will defrag your boot files and then defrag the rest of the drive. It also has a bunch of tweaks that are easy to apply that will speed up windows. http://www.driverheaven.net/dforce/showdoc.php?doc=txp_about

I would use that along with diskeeper for best results.

 

I use diskeeper, most of the peeps i know use either diskeeper or perfectdisk...can't go wrong with either one...certainly better than the standard windows one. One thing i don't like with diskeeper 9 is that the Windows event log service needs to be running, in 8 i don't think that was the case.

 

i got this the day i got my lappy
its the tits