WinXP Defrag alternative?

[breez]

I scanned the forum quickly and it seems this program calls home first before allowing the user to actually run it, so in other words this defragger is bullshit.

I agree that the use of networking is a needless complication, but the program doesn't seem to call home. I too scanned the forum quickly and didn't see any indication of that. Can you link me to a thread on the forums?

There is a command line version available that doesn't use networking.

Anyone who disputes that can just check what it says as an error message when the UDP port is blocked. "Connection to remote machine was unavailalbe."

Anyone who can't freakin spell simple common words is unlikely to also know how to program. Thanks, but no thanks. I'll have this shit off my system in a jiffy...

You are overreacting. That seems like a typo of the most common type and has nothing to do with knowing how to spell words.

BTW, it is spelled 'freaking'.

 

[chavvdarrr]

RE Perfect Disk 8.0 Vs Diskeeper 10.0 (Professional)

Why not trying a more detailed "review" ?
Like, for 2-3 weeks don't do defrag + do lots of things causing fragmentation - copying large files to almost fill the disk, then lots of small files to fill at 99%, etc.

Then delete these files and make image of the partition.
Run Perfect disk, write down time needed and impressions how fast is the boot
Restore the image and do same with DIskeeper

 

[MPI]

If you only have 15% of your HD space left then its time to upgrade it!

Sooo... It's time to upgrade 2 days after I bought it?!

As my CS teacher once said: -"There are only two states to a harddrive; New and Full."

 

[The_Wolf_Who_Cried_Boy]

Why not trying a more detailed "review" ?
Like, for 2-3 weeks don't do defrag + do lots of things causing fragmentation - copying large files to almost fill the disk, then lots of small files to fill at 99%, etc.

Then delete these files and make image of the partition.
Run Perfect disk, write down time needed and impressions how fast is the boot
Restore the image and do same with DIskeeper

I humbly but point to the path for the enlightened to follow....

 

[L233]

I strongly prefer O&O Defrag. I had considered Perfectdisk but I was seriously put off by that company's outlandish promises and their FUD tactics against their competitors..

They compared their defragmentation method to O&O's "Stealth" method and won by a huge margin. What they don't tell you is that "Stealth" is only one of 5 available defragmentation methods and it's meant mainly for defragmenting huge file servers while taking as little ressources as possible. O&O specifically states that this method is not as thorough as the other methods (I found it does consolidate free space only to a very small degree). A more appropriate comparison would have been O&O's "Space" method, which is the default defragmentation method...

So in the end I based my decision on the basic assumption that the main reason for companies trying to mislead potential customers is that their products don't compare favourably to competing products.

 

[Guden Oden]

Interesting. I never heard of this O&O defragger, has it shown itself to be reliable, in your opinion? What about performance?

Is it cheaper than the other major competitors?

I've not defragged any of my disks since I got this PC, and I suspect they are rather chopped-up by now. I need something.

I sure hope defragging companies aren't doing like Norton with their antivirus shit, and release a very minor update at full price each year, while simultaneously scaling back or outright dropping support for previous years' versions... Fortunately defraggers shouldn't need daily updates, but still.

Thanks for the infos!

 

[mjtdevries]

Why not trying a more detailed "review" ?
Like, for 2-3 weeks don't do defrag + do lots of things causing fragmentation - copying large files to almost fill the disk, then lots of small files to fill at 99%, etc.

Then delete these files and make image of the partition.
Run Perfect disk, write down time needed and impressions how fast is the boot
Restore the image and do same with DIskeeper

That would not be a good test.

The reason being that it is also important to measure how long a disk will stay defragmented. (how good is the free space consolidation for example)

The default defrag tool in windows might not do badly in that test, but your disk would be terrible fragmented again after a single day.

 

[Himself]

If you are finding defrag utils not doing much, try this on NTFS partitions:

fsutil usn deletejournal /D C:

I found it helped a lot, was have a problem with a hard drive turning off on it's own, turned out to be one of my power supply cables being shoddy, think that's what caused the NTFS journals to run amok, fragmenting the drive. Some defrag utils can fix that, but why have so many journals on your drive anyway, defragged or not? I don't care about fixing a problem from 4 years ago, lol.

 

[Bludd]

Using deletejournal

Deleting or disabling an active journal is very time consuming, because the system must access all the records in the master file table (MFT) and set the last USN attribute to zero. This process can take several minutes, and can continue after the system restarts, if necessary. During this process, the change journal is not considered active, nor is it disabled. While the system is disabling the journal, it cannot be accessed, and all journal operations return errors. You should use extreme care when disabling an active journal, because it adversely affects other applications using the journal.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...p/all/proddocs/en-us/fsutil_usn.mspx?mfr=true

 

[Himself]

"The USN change journal is enabled and used by the Indexing Service, File Replication Service (FRS), Remote Installation Service (RIS), and Remote Storage."

None of those services were being run when I did it, took a few seconds.

 

[mjtdevries]

I'd rather have some more fragments, instead of losing data because journaling is turned off.

 

[Himself]

It wasn't a few fragments in my case, 30% of the drive was dotted with sectors with journal logs, meaning large files had nowhere to go. Also the command doesn't turn off journaling, it just deletes the current logs. Kinda like deleting a pagefile before defragging or wiping your temp folder, worked for me, just thought I would throw it out there in case someone else had the same problem.