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I am using Diskeeper 5 now and have used DK 4 for the past 3 months. I
bought the full version for about 45. DK5 is free to DK4 users and can be
downloaded off DK website. DK5 works on Win95/98 as well as NT. The
interface is somewhat different but basically its the same as DK4.
I had the same experience as Gary when I first used DK but things get better
with time. I have a PII450, 256mb with NT4 on C drive, Ts2k on D drive,
both NTFS. My computer runs 24/7 except for weekend reboot, defrag and data
backup. DK would not initially fully defrag drive C or D until I used the
boot time directory consolidation feature a couple of times. Still had fair
amount of fragmentation even after that. Repeated manual defrags did not
help much. Cure was Set and Forget feature. I sceduled DK to defrag drive
C continuously from 8pm to 12midnight every day and it defrags drive D
continuously from 12 midnight to 6 am every day. AFter a few days both
drives had very low fragmentation. On Sat when Ts2k is closed out I
manually run DK. It defrags drive C to almost perfection, maybe 3-6 file
fragments. This amounts to zero fragmentation as a practical matter. Drive
D which is where Ts2k lives defrags completely every time.
I dont know whether the defraging helps with stability but it sure makes
Ts2k respond faster. New charts that read data off the hard drive snap up
much faster. Overall Ts2k definitely runs faster.
I did an absolutely clean install of NT4 SP4 and Ts2k SP2b on a freshly
formatted hard drive about 10 weeks ago. I used to crash GS many times per
week and charting once in a while. Now charting never crashes and I have
less than one crash per week by GS. Still sucks but way better than before
the clean install. I started using DK at the same time so I cant isolate
any effect from that alone.
As to defraggers in general it isnt how pretty they make your harddisk look
on the graphic display in the program, its how fast your software runs.
>From reading stuff on internet and from Microsofts decision to incorporate
DK into Win2k I would say it is a superior tool. Generally I feel utility
software is more hype than real benefit. But I would say from my experience
that DK is well worth using.
Bill Wood
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gary Fritz [mailto:fritz@xxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Saturday, September 18, 1999 5:20 PM
> To: Richard
> Cc: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Defragging Win NT (Was: How to get TS2k to run well (was 2K
> for sale)}
>
>
> > For any Win NT user, Diskeeper Lite sounds well needed and a true
> > bargain.
>
> I also downloaded DK Lite a few days ago, and I'm not quite as
> impressed.
>
> I ran it on my C drive (NTFS) which was fairly heavily fragmented.
> It's 70% full (3GB out of 4.3), so there is 1.3GB free on it, and
> there was a single contiguous 250MB free space on it due to moving my
> VM swap space to the D drive just before running DK Lite.
>
> Any decent defragger I've ever seen would have been able to
> completely defrag this disk and create large free spaces. DKlite had
> plenty of free space to work with, including the large contiguous
> piece. But DK Lite couldn't fully defrag it, even after 7
> consecutive defrags!! Furthermore, the first defrag, instead of
> consolidating fragmented files in the large free space, splattered
> the free space all over the disk and left many fragmented files
> behind.
>
> More troublesome, the information from the program was inconsistent.
> DK Lite has an "Analyze" mode and a "Defrag" mode. Both report the
> number of fragmented files and the number of "excess fragments."
> Here are the results of running many A's and D's:
>
> FragFiles ExcessFrags
> A: 3600 52000 (TS4 database was in 3700 pieces.... :-)
> D: 100 22178
> A: (forgot to record this one)
> D: 100+ 8000
> A: 24 13000
> D: 6 1312
> A: 18 12103
> D: 4 4102
> A: 14 8003
> A: 33 8346 (might have been a defrag between these?)
> D: 2 37
> A: 11 7934
> D: "Can't defrag any further"
> A: 14 7705
> D: 4 109
> A: 10 7596
>
> I did some operations between some of these Defrag/Analyze cycles,
> but not enough to cause that kind of variation. I always analyzed
> immediately after the defrag finished, and the D & A answers were
> always wildly different.
>
> Meanwhile, the graphical display of the disk showed most of the disk
> being fragmented, even after 7 defrag passes!
>
> And on my D drive, the graphic Analysis display showed more used
> (contiguous) files than empty filespace, even though there's only
> 1.9GB used and 6.8GB free on that drive! Then I ran a defrag on D
> and most of the previously "used" space turned magically into "free"
> space!?
>
> For free, it's hard to complain too much. I suspect my disk is in
> much better shape than it was before. The full version offers
> important improvements, like the ability to run a defrag at bootup so
> you can move/consolidate directories. And the DiskKeeper defraggers
> have the VERY nice feature that they can supposedly defrag a file
> even if it's open by another application. (Hence Ullrich's ability
> to run it every night without shutting down TS.)
>
> But I'm leery of buying the full-featured version if the freebie demo
> acts this bizarre.
>
> Gary
>
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