Disk Defragmenter Utilities Help Improve System Performance

One of the most common complaints about PC's is that over time, they tend to run slower and slower.

Even more so than today's automobiles, computers are prone to significant performance degradation over time.

In what seems an ironic twist, today's cars containing multiple computers use those systems to require even less regular maintenance than PC's.

Fortunately, a number of freeware utilities have appeared recently that can help with maintaining PC hard drive performance. Here are a couple of my personal favorites:

Many PC owners know that occasionally (I recommend weekly) running the Disk Defragmenter found in the System Tools folder is a good idea.

Best used with the adjacent Disk Cleanup program, Disk Defragmenter reorders the data on a disk to make it faster for Windows to find data on a hard drive, improving performance.

Far fewer users know that Windows Disk Defragmenter is actually a (very) “lite” version of Diskeeper (www.diskeeper.com), a professional program that has been in use for years in professional and enterprise-level commercial applications which are required to process as much information as possible as fast as possible.

The drawback for most home PC users to Diskeeper is its cost, starting at around $50. However, two new freeware disk defragmenters have recently become available that can help improve on the performance of the standard Disk Defragmenter.

The first is the Auslogics Disk Defrag (www.auslogics.com). This simple to use free program performs additional steps beyond the standard Windows version to help reorder drive data.

I recently used this program on a system that had been serviced with Windows Disk Defragmenter. The Auslogics Disk Defrag program found the drive was still almost 25% fragmented, and was able to bring that down to under 10% by the time it was finished.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is available for Windows 2000, XP and Vista systems. It;s usually a good idea to run it once a week at night without other tasks running.

If your system is running well and has plenty of free memory, a second program can offer the same kind of “on-the fly” disk defragmentation that expensive paid programs provide.

The IOBit SmartDefrag program (www.iobit.com) actually runs continuously in the background, optimizing data and disk performance automatically.

This freeware utility has received strong reviews from most major software sites, and with good reason. It's the only easy-to-use free utility of its type that runs in the background, unlike Windows Disk Defragmenter or other programs that users have to remember to run an regular intervals for maximum usefulness.

The downside of SmartDefrag is the fact that like any program running in the background on a PC, it uses system memory that is also used for other tasks.

My experience with SmartDefrag suggests that it is best used on Windows XP systems with at least 1GB of system RAM, and on Vista systems with at least 2GB.

Keeping both of these free programs on hand and running them on a regular basis can help keep system performance at levels closer to when systems were new.

Tom Meek is a computer and media consultant working with businesses and individuals on high-tech needs. Another Day In Cyberville is published weekly in print and online via The Gainesville Voice, a weekly publication of The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group. You can reach Tom Meek at adayincyberville@gmail.com.