Product Reviews

Over time, the files stored on a hard disk get scattered all over the place - a process called 'fragementation'. This slows Windows down because it has to spend time finding all the bits of a file before the file can be opened.

Diskeeper 10 Home Edition fixes this problem by tidying up all the files on your hard disk - defragmenting the disk. Windows comes with a free disk defragmenter though, so Diskeeper will have to do something pretty impressive to justify its £24 asking price.

In our tests, Diskeeper was no faster than Windows own disk defragmenter. In fact, the Windows utility was marginally quicker. Windows's utility defragmented our 5GB test partition in 46 minutes. We restored the partition to its original state from a disk image and defragged with Diskeeper. This took

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52 minutes to run. Both programs brought the drive to a state of zero defragementation, so software didn't run any faster on the image defragemented with Diskeeper.

So there's no point in Diskeeper then, right? Well, not quite. Windows disk defragmenter can't be scheduled - you just have to remember to run it. Diskeeper, on the other hand, has a feature called Smart Scheduling. This allows you to schedule defrags and also lets the program run in the background, taking advantage of any idle time to defragment your hard disk on the fly. Used like this, the application will prevent your hard disk ever getting badly fragmented, which is really worth while.

We performance tested both fragmented and defragmented hard disks by extracting lots of different files from a large compressed folder, a disk intensive operating. On a relatively modern computer, the test ran almost 30 per cent faster on a drive that was properly defragmented.

The slight downside to using Diskeeper when you're away from your computer is that unless you've insulated your PC with noise reduction material, all that hard disk activity can get really noisy.

The home edition of Diskeeper is as easy to use as you could possible ask for. It automatically configures Smart Scheduling for all local hard drives. So you can install it and forget about it and it will work away in the background.