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Defrag: Jumpstart Your Hard Drive

Posted on: Wednesday, 5 September 2007, 21:03 CDT

Hard drive clutter. It's a term we are, though regretfully, familiar with. You're working on your latest project Y, the deadline is in an hour, and your fellow coworkers are huddled over the desks, clicking furiously in folder Y. You attempt to access a subfolder, and the seconds tick by. Then minutes. You decide to start all over at C:/, but that makes it even worse. You glance at the small, ticking hourglass, then toward the kitchen, pondering a bagel. All computers naturally accumulate clutter, also referred to as fragmentation, as pieces of files gradually scatter across the hard drive, building up and slowing down performance. You might even notice this in particular, when running third-party anti-spyware or anti-virus software scans on your entire hard drive: the usual 10-minute or 15-minute scan, over the course of a few weeks, starts to take 30 minutes and longer just to finish. The solution? Defragmentation, or, defrag.

Diskeeper Corporation (www.diskeeper.com) performed timed side-by-side tests of its latest version of its defrag software, Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier, on two computer platforms, while running sample third-party anti-spyware and anti-virus software programs, also known as anti-malware, and the results?

The tests used both Windows XP Professional with Service Pack (SP) 2, and Windows Vista Ultimate platforms, with various, well-known anti-malware programs. In addition, testers used an average computer user's workstation with mild fragmentation, and installed familiar software from Download.com's Top 100 Most Popular list, and Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier.

Testers operated the third-party software scans before, during, and after Diskeeper defrag software was run. After five trials per Windows platform, results are as follows:

A 23.3% improvement in scan time was observed in Windows XP.

A 19.2% improvement in scan time was observed in Windows Vista.

Moreover, reductions in scan time were readily apparent even during the Diskeeper defragmentation process. In fact, in a majority of the trials, the "during defrag" state nearly mirrored the "post defrag" state.

Chances are you've been using your workstation for a longer time than the test computers. Any computer with more than six months of usage is likely to yield significantly higher numbers of fragmentation, thus significantly slower C:/ scan times. But with an adequate defrag program, sluggish, desktop woes would be a thing of the past.

 Contact: Colleen Toumayan Email: ctoumayan@diskeeper.com

SOURCE: Diskeeper Corporation

Source: MARKET WIRE

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