Diskeeper Lite freeware!

[Dramen]

Diskeeper Lite freeware is back.
Exesoft has just released Diskeeper lite as freeware which now works with WinXP. There's not many options as say Norton Speed Disk, but it's Fasssst! :thumbsup:

http://www.execsoft.com/downloads/menu.asp?ad=dkldl1

[[ GK ]]

Nice! Will have to give it a look. Thanks for the heads-up, Dramen. :)

[Dramen]

Forgot to mention, there's a popup when you start the program which asks if ya want to upgrade to pro, just click close. Not too much of an annoyance considering it's free.

[Tuffie]

Thank's for the head's up Dramen :D,I'll install that today,and try it out,Thanks !!

[Darcy]

D, - am i reading this right? - this is a defragger utility? (last time i did a check of disk space, window came up saying one wasn't needed at the time ...?). don't mean to get OT about how often to do, just want to make sure i understand purpose of this d/l. thanx.

[Dramen]

Darcy, that question is not OT, its relative and a good question. :)

The Win defragger will wait until your disk is fairly defragged before it will advise you to go ahead. Don't wait for that, defrag often, at least once a week. This improves disk performance a great deal.

[Darcy]

once a week?! i have never defragged. well, looks like a d/l for me, then. thanx very much, Dramen, i appreciate it. :)

[Thesittingduck2]

IMO defragging after a session (significant) of installing, uninstalling and deleting is advicable.

[JohnnyBra]

Yah, in theory, I try to defrag once every 2 weeks or so. In reality, I get around to it once every 2 months or so.

[Dramen]

Thats interesting Darcy, that you have never defragged, interesting because this was one of my primary questions I had intended on asking you when you were having overheating problems. When you said your pc acted sluggish and boot time was slow, I thought...in bad need of defrag. It may not be the reason you had OH problem but it really is important to defrag on a more "regular" basis than never. ;)

PS. Since you have never defragged the first time will take a while, after that it will go much faster, providing you don't wait til never again. :)

[floppybootstomp]

I have the full version of Diskeeper (V7.0) and actually defrag every day.

It's a good product :)

[Tuffie]

I agree with Duck's,I defrag after almost any install, that amounts to anything.I use the WinMe defrag on 98SE and it's pretty fast,especially if you do it often :D

[Dramen]

Flops, ditto on the everyday, takes no time to defrag when you keep after it.

[JohnnyBra]

Welp, I'll definatly give this one a try :) Maybe I can get into the habbit of daily defraggin like you guys

[Darcy]

thanx fellas. :) Dramen, ur post makes a lotta sense to me and would speed up some things. Unfortunately, like i said, i blindly followed Win defragger's "status" as a guideline.

based on the posts here, heck, - i gotta ask: -- no defrag in 7 months and been installing progs like no tomorrow. how long u figure the procedure to take?

[JohnnyBra]

Depends on the size of your hard drive and how much of it is used.

I always start it before going to bed and it's done by the next morning.

[Dramen]

Hard to say, depends on how much is on your disk and how badly defragmented, but I would guess about 10-15 minutes (maybe longer) since its been 7 months. If you have a screensaver set and/or anti-virus prog running disable them first. Now go do it. :)

EDIT:
Sorry for the double post JB, you got in just as I posted.

[Darcy]

30 HHD; oh, thanx for mentioning; - i have NAV running.


Now go do it. :)
yes, boss. :)

[BeerCheeze]

DK Lite is a good utility! I use Norton's, and I don't defrag on any schedule except when I get more than 2% fragramented. This euqals about once a month for me, give or take.

But, yea.. it's a VERY VERY VERY good thing to do on a regular basis.

[ImaginAsian]

I use O&O Defrag about once a month like Cheezy, defragging every day is not needed IMO since your files can't get fragmented enough especially if you set a permanent swapfile and defrag the swapfile one time.

i span my swapfile across two drives; 384MB each, defragged and permanent and now they never get fragemented. Spanning across two physical drives is sort of like a mini-raid...there I did it hehe

defragging is not something to take lightly - whne u defrag u better be damn sure your rig is stable and not OCd to be "reasonably" stable....things crash here and you going to hating life...after all its moving your DATA around. thats also one reason i only defrag when i have to...

[floppybootstomp]

Hmmm, interesting. I don't have a swap file but I do have a RAID. I'm overclocked just a little bit and my system is stable.

The Diskeeper 7.0 map shows I have defragmentation even after 24 hours use and it does vary day to day. The more games I play on the computer, the more defragmentation I seem to get.

Must admit sometimes I forget and don't defrag for several days and then it takes longer. I'm using two x 20Gb = 40Gb HDD, btw.

[ImaginAsian]

true, you will always be starting to fragment immediately after a fresh defrag routine BUT that's ok. a 5% fragmentted disk is not the end of things nor will it really hurt performance terribly. what hurts is if you allow windows to dynamically set a temp swapfile because then it juts starts sticking the swapfile in any place it can. better to have it permanent and static.

i use a SPACE defrag to keep things organized (its fast) and then come in with the DATE defrag for the heavy duty defrag. I probably do the SPACE defrag twice as much as the DATE defrag.

Tim likes Diskeeper for certain features that I can't remember off the top of my head atm. Hope he bumps into this thread...

[whipat]

Always installing and removing:) defrag every week or so

[Alakazam]

Darcy, check out the basic tutorial on Defrag in the 101 forum. That was a shameless plug if I ever wrote one, LOL.

http://www.bitbenderforums.com/vb22/showthread.php?s=&postid=149007#post149007

[Darcy]

oh, thanx very much, Zammy. by all means, plug away :) i just gave it a quick scan; will definitely read it fully.

[Techvillage]

Diskeeper Pro 7 is an excellent de-fragger - the options on top of the Lite version, are that it has a scheduler built in so can set schedules for de-fragging and for get about it. Try and beg borrow or steal....

But to me, and I have Diskeeper Pro 7, and use it all the time, is that u can set what's called Boot Guard defrag and I have copied and pasted the Help file section of what this does:-

Boot-Time Defragmentation Mode
Windows NT/2000/XP Note: The Boot-Time Defragmentation feature is only available on the Windows NT/2000/XP versions of Diskeeper. It is selected by clicking the Boot-Time Defragmentation option in the Action menu. (Or, you can click the Boot-Time Defragmenter tab in the select Disk Volume Scheduler window.)
Diskeeper is designed to be operated in three ways — the "Boot-Time Defragmentation" mode, which runs only when you restart your computer; as well as the Set It and Forget It <Set_It_and_Forget_It_Mode.htm> and Manual Defragmentation <Manual_Defrag_Mode.htm> modes, which run while your disk volumes are online and available to other applications and users.
Important: For best results with the Boot-Time Defragmentation feature, Executive Software strongly recommends:
Do a full backup of the disk volume before running any Boot-Time operations. This provides an additional level of safety in case of a disk drive failure.
Enable the Run CHKDSK before defragmentation option. This will help prevent vital files from being moved to bad disk sectors.
Boot-Time Defragmentation can take a long time, especially on very large disk volumes that are severely fragmented. Therefore, before running Boot-Time operations, you should:
Schedule the Boot-Time operation on weekends or other time when the machine is not needed immediately.
Schedule to perform the Boot-Time operation on only one disk volume at a time.
Make sure you have sufficient contiguous free space. Delete unneeded files and perform one or more manual defragmentation runs to defragment the volume as much as possible.
Running during boot-time, the Boot-Time Defragmentation feature:
Defragments and consolidates directories into a single location
Defragments MFT and paging files
This is done at boot-time, since directories, the MFT and paging files are objects that cannot be defragmented safely while the volume is being accessed by other applications or users. (Note: Directories cannot be moved online on Windows NT systems; however on Windows 95/98/Me and Windows 2000/XP they can be moved safely online).
By its nature, Windows allows directories to be written into random locations. This, in effect, breaks up the available pieces of free space on the volume. By grouping all the directories into a single location on a volume, larger areas of contiguous free space become available. As a result, new files are more likely to be written to the volume in a contiguous manner. This also helps make Diskeeper more effective when it is run in either the Set It and Forget It or Manual Defragmentation mode. The same holds true for fragmented MFT and paging files. By defragmenting the MFT and paging files, larger areas of contiguous free space become available for new or modified files.
Note, however, that there are two directories that Windows NT expects to find in a particular physical location on the volume. For this reason, the Diskeeper Boot-Time Defragmentation operation excludes these two directories and does not move them. The directories are \Recycler and \Recycled. Because these two directories cannot be moved, the Boot-Time Defragmentation will probably leave one or two directories that are not consolidated with the rest of your directories.
The Boot-Time Defragmentation feature relies on finding enough contiguous free space into which all the directories, the MFT, or the paging file will fit. For this reason, you should run Diskeeper in one of its online modes before running the Boot-Time Defragmentation feature.
In most cases, you should run the Diskeeper Boot-Time Defragmentation shortly after the first time you use Diskeeper on a volume (Diskeeper should run at least once to create a contiguous free space to move the directories or paging file into), or after any operation (such as installing a new application) that creates multiple directories. By moving all the directories together, you create more contiguous free space for file defragmentation. After running the Boot-Time Defragmentation, use either the Set It and Forget It or Manual Defragmentation mode to keep the volume defragmented.

It's a smashing piece of software and I can't recommend it enuf.

The royal pain in the arse for me is that the regular version costing £30 or so won't defrag Win2k Server series, u have to go out and buy the server version which cost aprox £200...... :mad:

So on my Win2k servers at home, I just use the built in de-fragger.

That really pisses me off because Executive have done so, because they know corporates will pay for it.

[martzweb]

Yes, it's a good product, and i think it's worth the money. Althought £200 for the server version ?? *cough* *cough*

[JohnnyBra]

The Set it and Forget it is nice..

My HD's defrag at 4:00 a.m. daily now. Great piece of software!

[SeniorCitizen]

Originally posted by Darcy
thanx fellas. :) no defrag in 7 months and been installing progs like no tomorrow.

Sure hate to be on the opposing side of this s/w, but tried 'em both, full ver and the lite freebie. They were slower than molasses in the wintertime. 17 mins to get to 10% of a 20mb hd w/only 3mb on it. My regular defrag that came w/win2k does the entire drive in 10/15 minutes every coupla weeks or so. Wasn't for me.

Darcy, reason for the quote is you may want to ck out a free registry cleaner called REGSCRUBXP. After running both norton windoctor and easycleaner, then ran the above, it found 106 entries of garbage left behind from old proggies that the other two didn't/couldn't find. Just thought I'd mention it to ya...:)

[andrini2000]

I heard about this before but didn't want it. Now after your reviews, it sounds excellent.
D/l'ing as I type.
Thanks for the link. :)