Diskeeper 7.0 Second Edition Review Living in a Contiguous State Eric Grevstad
Mon 3/17/03 -- Your PC needs two things to keep running smoothly and safely. If you're like most PC users, you do one incompletely and the other not at all.
The first necessity is antivirus and firewall protection against malicious code and prying eyes; the incomplete aspect is that while most PCs nowadays are at least shipped with an antivirus (though rarely a firewall) package, few folks bother to keep up with virus definitions and updates as often as they ought. But that still earns a higher preventative-maintenance score than users' near-universal neglect of a problem as old as DOS: hard disk fragmentation.
As we wrote 15 months ago, Executive Software's utility Diskeeper 7.0 enjoys 98-plus percent of the market among corporate IT managers responsible for the chore of defragmenting hard drives -- tidying and rearranging kilobytes to undo the splitting and scattering of programs and files into multiple pieces that occurs as you add and delete items.
The reason is that Diskeeper eliminates the chore: It works automatically in the background to keep even large applications, databases, or image or video files intact or contiguous. You don't notice Diskeeper working, and you don't notice the delay that drags down the performance and shortens the life of a drive head forced to zigzag to 10 or 20 far-flung sectors to load a fragmented file.
Even if you run it in manual rather than automatic mode, you'll find Diskeeper does a faster and more thorough job than the similar-looking but much more bare-bones defragmenter supplied with Windows. And now, version 7.0 Second Edition (SE) offers even more options -- and makes it even harder to excuse having an unhappy, overworked hard disk.
Like the first edition (it's a free upgrade for owners thereof), Diskeeper 7.0 SE Workstation costs $50 boxed or $45 as a download; the server version starts at $250 ($400 for a small-business bundle of one server and five workstation licenses). There's also a $30 ($25 download) version for a non-networked home PC and a freeware, manual-mode-only Diskeeper Lite; all work with Windows 95 OSR2 or later.
After installation, you'll want to run the program manually once, first clicking the "Analyze" button to see a map of your drive and a status report --
-- and then clicking "Defragment Now" to tidy the drive (with none of the annoying bailouts you may remember from Norton Speed Disk or other third-party defraggers, which are prone to restart every time another program or background process writes to the disk).
Executive boasts that Diskeeper takes as little as one-fifth the time of Windows XP's built-in disk defragmenter; it processed our Pentium 4/2.53 Win XP desktop's 80GB drive in just under 22 minutes. The program gives you the before-and-after stats in an overview; a "View Report" button lets you see a detailed list of which files remain fragmented (on our system, just a handful of activity logs and browser cache items).
For absolute peak efficiency, Windows NT/2000/XP users can occasionally perform a special boot-time defragmentation that unifies the master file table and virtual-memory paging file (which can't be modified while the operating system is running normally). This took just a few minutes when we tested the earlier version, but required a good half-hour this time.
After these first-day runs, however, you'll most likely leave Diskeeper in "Set It and Forget It" mode, in which it performs additional, on-the-fly defragmentation either on a set schedule (such as at 2:00 A.M. on Tuesdays) or every so often according to its own "smart scheduling" -- more frequently if the program finds itself needing to move more files, less frequently if you're not causing many changes.
That sounds like it'll interrupt your work, but the remarkable thing about Diskeeper is that it doesn't -- except for a flickering icon in the system tray and some audible hard-disk activity, the program performs its maintenance while you use your PC as usual, adding just one small process and a few threads set to Windows' lowest multitasking priority. The only difference is that your hard disk won't get fragmented anymore, or you won't be able to complain to your boss about how your slow PC means you need a new one.
The big change in 7.0 Second Edition is the additional choice of three new defragmentation modes or alternatives to the default "maximum disk performance" setting. The first is a speedy "quick defragmentation" mode that restitches files together without taking time to consolidate free space; the second is the opposite, a mode that takes more time to obtain maximum free space as well as quick-loading files.
The third is an intriguing alternative to Diskeeper's usual background operation: it defragments the hard disk whenever your Windows screen saver is active. This option might appeal to users who begrudge even the negligible performance hit of "smart scheduling," but has the drawback of being abandoned or aborted whenever you move your mouse; it's best if your PC will be inactive (and in screen-saver mode) for at least a few minutes, as during a lunch break.
We've liked Diskeeper 7.0 since it debuted, and we like the minor extra refinements of Second Edition. Especially now that the no-networked-drives Home Edition is available for as little as $25, it's a smart and wonderfully painless way to take care of -- well, to delegate -- one of computing's most fundamental, most neglected routine checkups.
