Price:
A low online delivered price is $47.00

System Requirements:
Diskeeper 9 Professional runs on Windows 95/98, ME, XP, and 2000.

Executive Software, 7590 N Glenoaks Blvd. , Burbank , CA 91504   800-829-6468  www.executive.com

Support: Web site and email support.

Diskeeper 9.0

By Barton Koslow  

The slowest part of any computer system is the hard drive. CPU’s and memory access information in nanoseconds (billionths of seconds). Your hard drive accesses information in milliseconds (thousandths of seconds). No matter how fast the rest of your system is, your hard drive is often the limiting factor when it comes to speed. Every time you erase or move files on a hard drive you leave spaces that are later used by newer files that are written to the drive. Unfortunately, the space or spaces left by the erased or moved files often does not fit the new file data. What happens? The operating system puts the new file data in all the empty spaces it can find. The new data may end up split into numerous areas on the drive. This is called fragmentation (the entire file is not in one contiguous space). The more you erase, move, and add files the more fragmented your files become. When the system has to access a fragmented file and look at many places on your hard drive to find it, it takes longer to retrieve it. The more fragmentation, the slower access becomes until you may begin to wonder why your “fast” computer is so slow! Fragmentation of your Master File Table and paging file may cause your system to become unstable and unreliable resulting in crashes, freezing and other problems.  

The solution is to defragment or optimize your drive on a regular basis. Defragmenting assembles the pieces of each file into a contiguous file at a single disk location. There is a defragmenter built in to your operating system. The problem is that you have to remember to use it. Most of us either do not or do so infrequently at best. Diskeeper is the answer to this. Once you install Diskeeper, you set it and forget it. Diskeeper does all the work in the background on a continuing basis.  

Diskeeper comes in five versions: Home Edition, Professional Edition, Server Standard Edition, Server Enterprise Edition and an Administrator Edition.  The Administrator Edition is for larger networks. the Server Editions are for servers. Most of us will use either the Home or Professional Editions. This is a review of the Professional Edition which provides more functionality and reliability on NTFS volumes and a wider variety of configuration option over the Home Edition. The Professional Edition is recommended for Windows XP.  

Installation is simple and straightforward. The Diskeeper screen has five menu selections in the left pane: Set It and Forget It; Analyze Selected Volume; Defragment Selected Drive ; Change Your Settings: and Help. The right pane shows a list of your drive partitions (in my case C: D: F: G: and I) with six tabs below the drive list: Performance, Reliability, Performance Map, Fragmentation, Set It and Forget It and Drive Map. This is very intuitive software. I never had to read the manual. There is one in the program. A full manual may also be downloaded.  

The first thing I did was Analyze each drive for fragmentation. Next, I Defragmented each drive.

Last, I went to Set It and Forget It to make a selection. Choices are Smart Schedule (automatically monitors fragmentation and schedules background defragmentation as needed. - New in this version, Diskeeper stops processing when another program requests drive access.), Smart Schedule after hours (only runs between 10PM and 4 AM), Run Every Night (between 10 PM and 4 AM), Run on Weekends only (runs every 4 hours Saturday and Sunday), Screen Saver mode (runs when screen saver is active), and Custom Schedule. I finally chose Screen Saver mode, and this has worked impeccably for me.  Now and then I bring Diskeeper on my screen and take a peek to see if my drives really are defragmented. My three physical drives (with five partitions) are either completely defragmented or almost completely defragmented. Wow! One less thing to think about.  

There is more to Diskeeper than this. Under Analyze Selected volume and Defragment Selected Drive there are six screens to show the condition of each drive after analysis, during defragmentation and upon completion of defragmentation. There is a selection to Change Your Settings. You may exclude particular files and/or folders, set defragmentation priorities, set defragmentation method, set event logging options, set power management options for battery operated computers, set performance scanning options, configure the Master File Table/Paging Files on your hard drives, and most significant, set up to defragment your paging files and Master File Tables on your next boot up. These last two features are not available in the Home Edition.  

This program should be on every computer. It is simple, automatic and reliable. I highly recommend it.