Diskeeper is an example of a company that has decided to specialize in just
a few products and do them especially well. I have no knock whatsoever
against the way its program works, although I prefer to do my defragmenta-
tion on a scheduled basis rather than add another program running in the
background while I work on other tasks. That said, the sophisticated pro-
gramming in version 9.0 and later gives other applications priority access to
the hard drive while it is running. Other features include the ability to defrag-
ment critical system files as recommended by Microsoft. For information
consult http://www.diskeeper.com. In Figure 19-2 you can see a Diskeeper analysis
of the status of a hard drive before work is performed.Norton Speed Disk is nearly as fast and capable of many of the same advanced
features as Diskeeper. For most users it is a worthy upgrade from Microsoft’s
built-in defragger with the bonus that it comes as part of the larger Norton
Utilities or Norton SystemWorks. For information consult http://www.symantec.com.
In Figure 19-3 you can see Norton Speed Disk at work moving pieces of files
on a heavily fragmented drive.Figure 19-2:
Diskeeper
reports that
the hard
drive is
slightly
defrag-
mented,
with an
estimate of
a 5-percent
improve-
ment in read
time when
work is
completed.
You’re likely
to notice a
real drag
on perfor-
mance with
more than
10-percent
fragmen-
tation.294 Part V: The Software Side of Life