I had the opportunity to review Diskeeper 2008, thanks to the kind folks of Blog2u.

There you go, the cover of the software… and I might have to add that this review are strictly my opinions about the software, based on what I see, and what I’ve done with it. It will be a long post, so do hang in there and read on…

Before I even started the installation process… there was a little booklet attached…

This little booklet is a quick start guide to get the user started on installation, features of the software etc. It comes printed in 2 languages – English and Chinese. And at the last page of it would be software activation instructions.

Installation of the software is simple and straight forward. I enabled the activation of Diskeeper after installation as well as enabling automatic defragmentation for all the drives in my computer.

And this is the program’s interface…

The interface is neat, and the clean look makes it easy for one to glance at the information displayed. Notice that there are 3 Columns – the Automatic Defragmentation, Boot-Time Defragmentation and Frag Shield. Hold your horses, I will come to that and explain what each is for.

Automatic Defragmentation uses InvisiTasking to defrag the hard disk by utilising the idle system resources, and in the long run, improves overall system performance.

I monitored on how InvisiTasking utilises the idle system resources, and found that it rarely takes up much of the available resources, and I can still run my other applications per normal, with no significant notice of lag time… I must add that I am quite impressed at how it uses the resources to do constant defragmmentation on my C drive.

Boot time defragmentation allows system files to be moved safely, as these files cannot be defrag or moved in the operating system. I can’t comment much on it, as I have not tried it at the point of writing.

Last but not least… Frag Shield…

Ok, Frag Shield prevents the Master File Tables (MFTs) from fragmenting, and contributes to overall improvement of paging files, and to put it simply… it means that your data can be accessed quickly, since optimality is maintained by Diskeeper 2008.

Having wrote so much thus far, I am sure that your burning question would be… How Diskeeper 2008 improves defragmentation of hard drives?

Well, to start off with, I hate defragmenting my hard disk, because the Windows Defragmentation tool is very slow… and that easily wasted half a day of my time defragmenting my drive! Thus I kinda gave up defragmenting my drive for about 1 year or more to date… And to be frank, I am slightly sceptical of how Diskeeper 2008 could make defragmentation easier…

So here I present a screenshot of how horribly defragmented my C drive is…before using Diskeeper defragmentation function.

See all that red patches all over? That is how bad my C drive looked before defragmentation.

The time taken to defrag normally will take me 3 hours, if I am lucky… with the Windows Defragmentation tool…

But with the Diskeeper 2008, it took me slightly under and hour! w00t! Now ain’t that something?! I find it impressive that it could defrag my heavily defragmented C drive, and does not break a sweat…

And this is the after defragmentation screenshot

Diskeeper also generates a nice report with statistics of the volume to be defrag… and here is an excerpt of the report. The report can be saved in a .txt format. The screenshots can also be saved from the program as well…

Job Report

Computer: BLAZEBLIZZ
Volume: SYSTEM (C:)

Findings and Recommendations
————————————————————————–
Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found
11,634 fragmented files and/or directories and 35,272
excess fragments.

The average number of fragments per file is 1.25.

Heavy fragmentation detected on this volume. Keep Automatic
Defragmentation turned on to correct this problem.

Also, free space on this volume is running low. Consider
actions to free more disk space.

Health
————————————————————————–
Warning!

The overall health of volume C: is degraded

The overall health is at “Warning” level for the following
reasons:

1. The volume is heavily fragmented. The average number of
fragments per file is 1.25.

2. The free space on this volume is very low (20%).
Diskeeper solves file fragmentation, but more free space
will also improve overall volume performance.

Last but not least, laptop users will be pleased to know that automatic defragmentation function is disabled when the laptop is running on batteries. This will help save the precious battery power when you are on the move. Neat eh?

Overall, I feel that Diskeeper reduces defragmentation timing, and having real time defragmentation by using idle system resources is a great way to keep all the data in the hard disk organised and not fragmented into pieces, which in turns improves overall system performance. At the point of writing, I noticed that my system does not lag even with the real time defragmentation is running in the background.

I hope you will like this software review. And I do recommend users to try this piece of amazing software.

Nicole