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Fragments of truth

Posted on 25 Feb 2005 at 12:21

David Moss looks at how much space the MTF in Diskeeper really needs before fragmentation sets in and your system slows to a crawl

With your systems selected, you supply account credentials that will be able to run the installations and then choose your deployment schedule. If you do not wish to install right away (the default choice), you can specify a date and time that you would find more suitable. Clicking on Next once more takes you to a Summary screen, which, as I would told Diskeeper Administrator to get on with the job right away, showed me the systems selected and the status of the PushInstall. I chose to push onto two workstations initially, and this took about a minute. Diskeeper Administrator reported back that both installations had gone smoothly, leaving me to click on Finish to complete the installation walkthrough.

It is worth bearing in mind that you will want to disable any software on the target systems that intercepts remote installations. On one of the machines I would chosen for this test (my main workstation), both Ad-Aware and Spy Sweeper reported that something was going on, and I needed to click on the Accept button in Ad-Aware before it would let Diskeeper make any modifications.

With the installation over, I turned my attention to seeing what I could do to manage the defragmentation schedule for the machines onto which I would just installed Diskeeper Professional. The Schedule Defragmentation Job link looked a likely candidate, so I followed it and was rewarded with another Explorer-like tree view of my domain, this time showing only systems onto which I would PushInstalled Diskeeper. Select computers individually and create a schedule for each in turn, or use the select-em-all approach. Then, choose the volumes you want defragged, creating two entirely separate schedules (Primary and Secondary) for each one if you wish. This is not quite as odd as it sounds, as circumstances might arise, for example, whereby the primary schedule is unable to trigger, so the secondary one can act as a sort of backup. These two schedules do not need to be set for entirely different times and can overlap each other if required. Naturally, Diskeeper will always select the primary schedule first and ignore any secondary schedule overlaps.

Having selected the volumes I wanted to be defragged, I was next presented with a screen that let me decide on the Set It and Forget It timings. By default, it is set to Smart Schedule every day with no defined start or end times, but you can change those rather sweeping settings.

There is, of course, much more to this software (right now, I'm off to generate some Diskeeper Administrator reports on my managed systems and to use the Remote Control capabilities to assign tasks to the Diskeeper installations on systems around the network), but I hope I have given you some idea of its capabilities and how simple it is to set up and operate. I will certainly be trying it further, but at the moment I can see no reason why I will not continue to use it to control Diskeeper installations on the networks I manage.