Utilities Poll - Week 6

profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
edited August 2003 in Science & Tech
This week's topic: Disk Defrag Tools

Your input will determine which programs are chosen to bear the proud title "Short-Media Approved", so be sure to vote!

Imagine starting work in your office with all of your days tasks stacked neatly in an organized form in your inbox. By lunchtime you have papers scattered all across your desk, and by the end of the workday there are papers everywhere. Then your boss calls you at 4:59 pm to ask about a particular file, forcing you to hunt through piles of paper to find the one you're looking for. At that moment, you are probably not feeling very efficient.

Your computer works the same way. The more you use your computer, the more the individual files on your hard drive get moved around, resulting in "fragments" of those files located in various places on your drive. When you go to use that file, windows must locate each fragment scattered across your drive in order to run the program or open the file. This will slow overall system performance and eventually make that Barton system with an 8MB cache hard drive perform like an old Packard-Bell running in compatibility mode. Defragging your hard drive will correct this problem by arranging the pieces of your files next to each other. This is a "must do" maintenance task if you wish to keep all of that expensive hardware working at peak efficiency.

Which Disk Defragger program do you rely on?

Please add your comments and opinions in this thread! Once this project is complete there will be an article written detailing the "S-M Approved" utilities. Knowing "what" you prefer would be great. Knowing "why" you prefer it would be even better.

I will attempt to modify the poll if one of the "Other" votes gets way more votes than one I've already listed.

Note: This is a repeat of a topic covered before we moved to a polling format. Any previous comments will be included in the results, but please vote in this poll.

Thanks for the great response last week. Once again, the voting was very close. Your vote matters - all comments and all software receiving votes will be mentioned when the Short-Media Approved Utilities list is published.

Comments

  • SouriatSouriat Nottingham, UK
    edited August 2003
    Diskeeper for me, downloaded it when windows defragger didnt seem to be doing much good, liked the program and have used it since.
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    Norton Speed Disk, I hear some complaints on how it can screw up your PC, I never saw any proof though. Been using it for many a year, tried other defragmentors, none ever came to be as good as Speed Disk.
  • SpinnerSpinner Birmingham, UK
    edited August 2003
    I've also long been a user of Speed Disk, but Diskeeper finally drew me in a few months back, and I've been using it ever since. I enjoy its speed above anything else, but the set it and forget it tools are very very handy.

    So Diskeeper got my vote.
  • TheSmJTheSmJ
    edited August 2003
    I'm an O&O user. After realizing Windows Defrag never really did much of anything, I started using O&O's and never looked back. I like it's many features, including scheduling, the many types of defrag methods, and the ability to defrag normally locked system files.
  • CyrixInsteadCyrixInstead Stoke-on-Trent, England Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    Got to be Diskeeper for me. I went from the excellent free Lite version to the full one and have never looked back.

    ~Cyrix
  • CBCB Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ Der Millionendorf- Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    A defrag's a defrag. I see no reason to use anything other than the program that came with windows. Anything more that another prog has is frills.
  • ShortyShorty Manchester, UK Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    I've never really found many defragging applications to be better than any other, so it's good old windows defragger for me :)
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    Windows Defragger. It may be slow, but using it instead of the others means one less third-party program to clutter up the registry with.
  • WuGgaRoOWuGgaRoO Not in the shower Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    i havnt really experimented with any defraggers....so ill stick to windows...however when it comes to checking if my disk has any errors (or lost clusters) i chose norton...it kicked butt when i needed it most
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    edited August 2003
    I use the windows defragger in XP. In the older versions of windows with the reaaaalllly slow defraggers, I tend to use norton :)
  • SpinnerSpinner Birmingham, UK
    edited August 2003
    Okay people, your week of voting and discussion is up. Time to move on to the next topic. Thanks to all of you for voting and posting your thoughts.

    SPINNER

    Week 7 can be found at the link below and the subject is 'Benchmarks':

    http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2883
This discussion has been closed.