Product Reviews

Defragmenting hard disks can be a simple way of improving system performance as files or programs are easier to access when they aren't scattered across various locations on the drive. Large companies could also make significant savings by carrying this out regularly on user's PCs as it can avoid making unnecessary hardware upgrades. There are plenty of defragmentation tools on the market although, up until recently, NTFS has had a raw deal. Popular utility suites have tended to concentrate primarily on Windows 95 or 98 users with Norton SystemWorks 2001, for example, only now including support for Windows 2000 and NT 4 Workstation. Diskeeper from Executive software has always supported FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS file systems and still has little serious competition - even a basic version of Diskeeper is the standard defrag tool included with Windows 2000.

Diskeeper Workstation is the standalone version and requires the MMC (Microsoft Management Console) and DCOM (Distributed Common Object Model). The majority of Windows 95 systems won't have these loaded while only DCOM is included as part of the standard Windows 98 installation. This is no problem though, as Diskeeper will check for their existence and load them during installation if required.

The main interface is a simple affair that displays all drives and volumes ready for selection. You can run an analysis on each one and see what condition it's in from the colour-coded graphic panel below. After each analysis is completed, Diskeeper will advise on the current state of the volume and suggest a suitable course of action. If the drive needs cleaning up, just select the Defragment button and leave Diskeeper to get on with it. Performance is a key feature of Diskeeper and this latest version is claimed to be up to five times faster than the previous version (reviewed enterprise, issue 65). It's certainly a lot faster than the bundled defrag tool supplied with Windows 95, or 98. On a Windows 98 test system with a heavily fragmented 2Gb partition, the standard Windows utility took over 63 minutes to tidy it up. The system was then reinstated to its original condition using a disk image and the drive was then defragmented using Diskeeper where it took only 25 minutes to complete the same task.

Diskeeper

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offers a whole heap of valuable features and all of these aren't available in the Windows 2000 bundled version. Using 'Set It and Forget It' you can schedule Diskeeper to run automatically in the background whenever you require. You can set intervals of between two hours and three days, exclude weekends and weekdays or run it continuously. Alternatively, the new Smart Scheduler feature can be used to determine the best interval as it keeps track of the number of files moved each time Diskeeper is run and dynamically alters the schedule as required. Priorities can be assigned to scheduled and on-demand tasks and performance can be improved by creating an exclusion list that contains file types that aren't to be processed. Reporting is good as Diskeeper maintains a text file on Windows 95, 98, or ME and uses the NT/2000 application event log. In both cases, you can decide which types of Diskeeper events to include.

Windows NT and 2000 require exclusive access to directories, the MFT (master file table) and paging file and these areas can only be safely accessed by Diskeeper during the boot sequence. Boot-Time Defragmentation consists of three separate activities that consolidate directories into a single location and defragments the MFT and paging file. The paging file is also protected from fragmentation during use as Diskeeper reserves an area of contiguous disk space for it to expand into. Each option can be selected from the main interface and they will be run on a one-time basis the next time the system is rebooted. Frag Guard automates this activity by monitoring the MFT and paging file and re-booting the system and tidying them up when fragmentation reaches a user specified level. Obviously, you don't want your system suddenly rebooting itself while you're using it so you can specify the days and times when Diskeeper is allowed to restart the PC.

Support departments will approve of the Server version as it allows them to access other workstations on the network from a single console, check their disk status and run Diskeeper manually or use the Smart Scheduler to automate this. Diskeeper Server only runs on Windows NT/2000 systems and all workstations must have user level and not share level access control configured in their Networking Properties otherwise the Diskeeper Server console will not be able to access them.

There are only two differences between the Workstation and Server interfaces but these extra features are powerful tools. In the Action menu, Set It and Forget It has a network option which allows you to select specific workstations or groups and apply schedules to them or leave the Smart Scheduler to determine this for each PC. Individual workstations can also be viewed from the Select Computer option. This displays available volumes as if they were local and allows you to analyse them and run Diskeeper as required.