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*** Solid State Drive (SSD) Owners, do NOT defrag your hard drive, ever ***
Ever since my first Microsoft Windows PC (Windows 95 was my first MS OS) I have been paranoid about keeping my machine defragmented. Back in those days it was a very real problem; if your machine was fragmented it slowed to an unusable crawl. I remember sitting down and watching the colorful little blocks blink on and off as my machine put fragments of files back together to alleviate this problem.
As many of you know, the built in Windows defragmenter has never been that good at cleaning up these fragments. As of Windows 7 its gotten better, but I still prefer a third party application. The current tool I use for this is Iobit’s Smart Defrag which is free for home use.
There are a number of features of this program that I enjoy, the main one being automatic defragmentation. With this program running I do not have to worry about manually defragging my computer every week. It is not perfect but at least it cuts down on the amount of manually defragging I have to do to about once a month or after I install or uninstall a large amount of data.
As far as performance goes, it does a good job of defragging. Not only does it defrag your hard drive, it attempts to optimize data as well by putting related files closer together on the physical disk for faster sequential reads. On some of my older machines this has made huge improvements to how they run.
The program runs silently in the background, and even though its free it does not blast you with ads or popups. It is lightweight and does not seem to impact system performance even on older P4 systems that I have it installed on. If you have at least a Pentium 4 computer with at least 1gb of RAM you will not even notice it is installed unless you open it manually.
Your mileage may vary, and you may have your own defrag program of choice. It’s Geektime recommends Iobit Smart Defrag as part of its IT Toolbox.
blog comments powered by DisqusEver since my first Microsoft Windows PC (Windows 95 was my first MS OS) I have been paranoid about keeping my machine defragmented. Back in those days it was a very real problem; if your machine was fragmented it slowed to an unusable crawl. I remember sitting down and watching the colorful little blocks blink on and off as my machine put fragments of files back together to alleviate this problem.
As many of you know, the built in Windows defragmenter has never been that good at cleaning up these fragments. As of Windows 7 its gotten better, but I still prefer a third party application. The current tool I use for this is Iobit’s Smart Defrag which is free for home use.
There are a number of features of this program that I enjoy, the main one being automatic defragmentation. With this program running I do not have to worry about manually defragging my computer every week. It is not perfect but at least it cuts down on the amount of manually defragging I have to do to about once a month or after I install or uninstall a large amount of data.
As far as performance goes, it does a good job of defragging. Not only does it defrag your hard drive, it attempts to optimize data as well by putting related files closer together on the physical disk for faster sequential reads. On some of my older machines this has made huge improvements to how they run.
The program runs silently in the background, and even though its free it does not blast you with ads or popups. It is lightweight and does not seem to impact system performance even on older P4 systems that I have it installed on. If you have at least a Pentium 4 computer with at least 1gb of RAM you will not even notice it is installed unless you open it manually.
Your mileage may vary, and you may have your own defrag program of choice. It’s Geektime recommends Iobit Smart Defrag as part of its IT Toolbox.
