Hard drives are like libraries. There are rows and shelves and books that make up a body of information and knowledge. If you are looking for a particular book, you look it up or ask your friendly neighborhood librarian and walk (or hike) to the spot. You find your book after scanning the shelves for a few and are off on your business. So too is it with your hard drive. They have blocks and sectors and files that consist of your files and programs.
Now think about if you had to find 10 books in the library instead of just one? You would have to find all the different spots where those books are, head to those shelves, and grab your book. Your library may still use the Dewey decimal system to classify books, placing them into knowledge classifications rather than by author or title. This would be inconvenient if you had 10 books all starting with the litter “A”.
Your computer has a lot of files to load when you turn on your computer, or load your favorite game. If these files are next to one another that program loads fast. If not, its slow and you consider buying a new computer.
Enter the concept of disk defragmentation. Instead of alphabetizing your hard disk, it places like files next to one another. Maybe by application, maybe by other means. By default Windows writes files out where there is space. It may put part of a file here, another part here, and so on for thousands of files. The more files and programs loaded onto a computer, the more scattered they can become. Its a major reason why a new computer appears to work fast, but over time slows down.
I’m not going to get into the “why” behind this happening, enough to say it would be nice that it didn’t. Fortunately there are several products to combat this. I’ve personally used the following:
Defraggler was by far my favorite until recently. It did a good job of keeping the files in order, even shutting down my computer when done. It had the bonus of actually displaying the defrag status. All this for FREE.
And then I received a promotional copy of Diskeeper from TechEd. I used Diskeeper years ago and liked it then, but stopped using it after a while. Mostly because I didn’t want to pay for the license, and partly because their tool appeared to be as good as the free ones. I was wrong.
There is an interesting new product called Soluto – Anti-frustration software. The major thing this free product does is graphically show how long it takes for your computer to boot, why, and how to fix it. Many vendors have pieces of their programs that load when a computer is turned on that serve a variety of purposes. Some to make it so their program appears to load faster, others to fetch updates. More often than not it takes an experienced person using MSConfig or CCleaner to remove unneeded things from system startup.
I tend to defrag my disks weekly using Defraggler. After I did my first full defrag with Diskeeper I rebooted and saw this with Soluto.
My boot time dropped from 1:30 to 1:15 just by defragging my hard disk with Diskeeper. A new feature in Diskeeper 2010 is their “Invisitasking” which defrags the drive while the system is idle. I really don’t like these features as they tend to still draw CPU away from other important tasks, like Team Fortress. But I gave it a shake and let it run, and low and behind not only didn’t I see any loss of game-play performance but it also cut my boot time by another 15 seconds.
Or, to properly call this out, using Diskeeper 2010 reduced my boot time by 30 seconds.
NOTE: the rise in the Soluto line has to do with me installing a variety of applications and service packs and I haven’t tried a reboot in a while.
As I mentioned earlier, I was given this copy of Diskeeper 2010 before writing this article. I wanted to pass along my experience and give credit where credit is due… and to insert Amazon links :)
Diskeeper 2010 Professional Single License Pack is available from Amazon.com for $60 at the time of this writing. Also get a 30-day free trial from their website and see for yourself.