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Review of Raxco PerfectDisk Manager
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Review of Raxco PerfectDisk Manager
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Purchase Link: http://www.raxco.com/home_office/home_office_perfectdisk_buy.cfm If you were a Software Developer and wanted to create the perfect Disk Management solution, you ought to look at PerfectDisk 2008: it has all the features your customers could ask for - including a few useful features they would not have thought of! PerfectDisk 2008 does not scrounge where Reports are concerned too: it clearly tells you what the performance of your Hard Disk was before defragmentation and what it is, after defragmentation. Indeed, PerfectDisk has it all! Here is what PerfectDisk 2008 can do, in terms of Hard Disk Management:
Here are some screenshots of PerfectDisk 2008 in action:
If you have not enabled PerfectDisk's Boot Time Defrag option, you need to
run the application, to get to the screen shown to the right here. To enable
Boot Time defragmentation, you need to click which drives you would like
defragged at boot time, by clicking the square Radio Buttons in the top half
of the screen, under the 6th column. Our settings currently are such that
none of our 3 partitions are defragged at boot time. Lets move on to the 3 Tabs in the bottom half of the screen, titled Drive
Map, Performance and Statistics. Your Drive Map will become visible only after you analyze the current status
of your Hard Disk. On analysis, you will get to see the current distribution
of files on your Hard Disk (as a Histogram, to the left of the screen) and
overall Current File Fragmentation (in the Pie Chart to the right of the
screen).
Once you have analyzed your Hard Disk, the Performance Tab shows you the
Performance, File Fragmentation and Free Space Fragmentation of your
Hard Disk, before and after defragmentation, in the past as well as
after the current run. Note that during the current run, our Hard Disk's performance has
actually gone down, (the Yellow Bar is smaller than the Blue Bar) since
we stopped the defragmentation so as to get on with this article!
However, the File Fragmentation has improved, even though the
defragmentation was stopped...
The 3rd Tab, titled Statistics presents this and other information in
terms of percentage, with qualifying remarks. As you can see, our Hard
Disk needs to have a larger free space chunk: although our Hard Disk
partition has 10.7 Gigabytes of free clusters, the LARGEST size that the
contiguous free clusters adds up to is a mere 2.82 Gigabytes. The rest
of the free clusters are all mixed up with the occupied clusters!
Under such conditions, the Windows Page File (to understand what is the
Page File or Virtual Memory and what is optimal for your Computer,
click here) would be sub-optimal, causing
minor to major slowdowns in your Computer! With PerfectDisk 2008 set to
do a Boot Time defragmentation, you can change all that! (More about
that later, on this page)
You can check out the other parameters by clicking the remaining lines
of text to the left of the screen - File, Most Fragmented Files,
Excluded Files, File Types, Performance Chart and Free Space Chart.
PerfectDisk checks and reports it all!
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Once you have analyzed your Hard Disk or Partition, select one of the following 3 options: SMART Placement, Consolidate Free Space or Defrag Only, right at the top of the screen. We recommend you select SMART Placement for maximum performance gains! Next, click on Entire Drive icon, to begin defragmenting your Hard Disk! A Hard Disk defragmentation drive can take hours, therefore you need to be patient! We also recommend that you select the Boot Time defragment buttons. Once Windows starts up, a few very large files become unmovable, as they are continuously used by Windows. These are the following files:
The only way to defragment these files is to stop Windows from running - but then, how does the Disk Manager run before Windows has started up? Leave it to the top-notch Disk Managers - and be patient while it works, for, at the end of the run, you get to use a much faster Computer! Yes, the first time you run defrag at Boot Time, it will probably take a long while, since you are likely to have very heavily fragmented unmovable files! However, later runs will take much lesser time. So patiently, let it complete - what you will get as the end result is a much faster Computer! Our analysis of PerfectDisk 2008 was performed with their Trial version. Following are the commercial versions of PerfectDisk 2008:
Phew - talk of choice of versions! Prices vary from US$ 39.99 (for the single-Computer Professional edition) and go as high as US$ 999.99 (for the VMware edition, with 25 clients). Attractive volume discounts have also been provided by the developers. PerfectDisk 2006 too does not have an automatic uninstall option, though it can be removed cleanly by going the Control Panel - Add/ Remove Programs menu...
To purchase PerfectDisk Defragmenter, click on the link; http://www.raxco.com/home_office/home_office_perfectdisk_buy.cfm |
