Information Week had a recent cover story entitled
Are Your Apps Smart Enough? This got me thinking, like most things do, of defrag programs and the "smarts" that are required to make the best defrag software. After all, any decent defrag utility, even freeware, is going to do a bare minimum (hopefully), to at least attempt to put fragmented files into a single piece and get you faster PC performance.
But how do you know if your defrag program is smart enough to be the best defrag software? Here are 12 to get you started:
- The developers of your defrag utility meet regularly with Microsoft development teams, including file system experts, for a true understanding of file system behaviors, strategies and plans.
- The defrag utility employs disk and file optimization strategies for the best possible drive optimization, rather than simply defragments files, so it is a true PC performance optimizer, beyond just a simple defrag utility.
- It performs robust free space consolidation to significantly prevent fragmentation, reduce the rate of future fragmentation and improve write performance.
- It's smart enough to just defrag a file -- a single file or a few selected files -- rather than the entire drive, if that's all that is fragmented and that's all you need done at a particular time.
- It doesn't force you into a single way to defrag - it provides flexible scheduling options that are accommodating to your activity and requirements, whether you need or want automatic background defragmentation during idle time, screen saver defrag, or daily or weekly schedules.
- It optimizes boot files to improve boot time by 20% or more.
- It provides a free, Microsoft-certified duplicate file remover and file recycler to further assist disk cleanup and optimization efforts.
- It's simple enough for the novice user but with free, optional advanced features for power users.
- It's smart enough to be the choice for tens of thousands of World of Warcraft users around the world to improve World of Warcraft performance and used by millions of gamers around the world to improve the performance of other PC games.
- It's intelligent enough to contain patent-pending technology that ensures no resource contention in virtual environments and can boost virtualization performance with specific solutions for vSphere and Hyper-V.
- It's passed the internal tests, pilot programs and RFPs of many of the world's largest companies and government agencies, and is deployed in and helping those enterprises today.
- It is certified by Microsoft for Windows 7.
Make sure your defrag tool is smart enough to be the best defrag software possible.
Reasonable people can have reasonable disagreements, and often do. Politics, music, travel, to name a few. And of course, our favorite - defragmentation. And while we naturally feel PerfectDisk gives you the best defrag, what often makes the decision to use PerfectDisk a no brainer is the large amount of functionality beyond disk defragmentation and free space consolidation - PerfectDisk’s Space Management component.
From freeing up space consumed by unnecessary files, to being able to find and remove duplicate files with PerfectDisk's duplicate file removal, to seeing a full view of a drive, many users find these tools invaluable. And the fact that they come included with a top-line defragger is all the better.
Leslie Alder of Austin, Texas writes that she was leaning towards PerfectDisk because she was impressed with the free space consolidation “that other tools I looked at did not address very well. But then I came across the Space Management piece of PerfectDisk and I was sold. I do a lot of video editing and I love being able to clean up my drive. After the cleanup and a defrag, my laptop and desktop run like new.” A slow PC fix that includes the ability to easily find and delete duplicate files.
To the moon, Leslie.
IndyGeek.net was formed last fall "to serve the latest in technology news to both geeks and non-techies alike by using a mix of social media, blogging and in-person networking." According to the site, "we place emphasis on the end user and small businesses looking to gain an edge in the ever-competitive mid-west market."
Well, it turns out the mid-west market is a lot like the rest of the world when looking for faster PC speed, faster PC startup, and overall faster PC performance. In a PC tuneup article on the IndyGeek site last week, Senior Editor Alex Connor wrote about PC Spring Cleaning Done Right, for those looking for faster PC performance. To get faster PC performance, Connor writes that, in his article, "we will use a variety of free tools, and I will recommend a few paid tools where I feel they provide a good value."
Connor covers backup, anti-virus, and cleanup of various files, including temporary files (while not mentioned in the article, PerfectDisk 11 Pro also does cleanup of duplicate and temporary files). Then Alex gets into my favorite part of every story - the defragmentation program:
He writes -- "defragging will usually help performance. Here’s where I make a recommendation – go order PerfectDisk and install it. It will prevent your disk from becoming highly fragmented and it has an offline boot-time defragger that can defrag your system files to really give you a performance boost. I even get a pretty significant runtime boost on my laptop by keeping the disk highly defragmented with PerfectDisk. If you use PerfectDisk, run the defragment on your drive, then do an offline defragmentation of your system files – which will require a reboot..."
For faster PC speed and slow PC tips, IndyGeek has some answers that you can read
here.
Computerworld's first issue of 2010 is out with its
Forecast 2010 Special Report, along with the headline
Ready to Roll. The premise? "IT budgets will be flat in 2010, but savvy IT execs are betting on new projects that have a big ROI and tap the best consumer technologies." Are ho hum topics such as defragmentation utilities, boot time defrag, and disk cleanup tools specifically in the report? No, but a lot that directly ties to defragmenting PCs is. Virtualization defrag, Windows 7 defrag, Windows Server 2008 defrag and a lot more are all connected. I'll be writing about some of these Computerworld topics and their relation to PerfectDisk and disk defrag software in coming posts.
And speaking of being ready to roll...the PerfectDisk 11 beta is too. We're anticipating our largest field test ever and are excited along with our testers to get it going. Because of the large number of testers at both the enterprise and consumer level, the test will be staggered a bit. So some of you may get access to the software before or after others. Please don't worry, you will be able to have at it soon. And I'll also be sharing bits about PerfectDisk 11 here from time to time and on up-to-the-minute news on
Twitter.
We appreciate your patience. As always, we're excited and looking forward to it all.
Here we go...
Related Post:
PerfectDisk 11 defrag -- on the horizon
When looking to Windows defrag software for Windows 7, there are various defrag programs to choose from and decisions you need to make. Do you want to be able to do a boot time defrag in order to defrag metadata? Is free space consolidation important? Do you want to boot quicker? Are you running any disk cleanup tools? Are you going to defrag Exchange databases?
There may be many more questions and requirements. Or your list for choosing between defrag programs might be short and sweet - you want a faster computer. One criteria that many people look for is certification from Microsoft. To some, it's just a "feel good" thing. To others, it's critical. And to some, it means nothing.
To us, it's important. We know there are many people that look to certification from Microsoft. And we know that many businesses have a requirement that they will only run certified applications. So PerfectDisk is certified by Microsoft for Windows 7.
In reviewing a disk defrag program, you might ask yourself why a particular product is not certified by Microsoft. For example, one area that Microsoft focuses on is overly-intrusive installations and snap-ins to the operating system - if a disk defragmentation tool is overly intrusive, Microsoft won't cerify the product. Look, with all the positive feedback Microsoft has garnered from Windows 7, it is not about to put a stamp of approval on an application that takes away from the positive user experience people are receiving from the new OS. Microsoft also made changes to the boot process in Windows 7, and we modified PerfectDisk to address these changes.
So one can choose to tell the world that certification doesn't matter and the fact that a program just works with Windows 7 is good enough.
We choose a different path for our users -- no risk.
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