Is it just me, or do people writing programs for Windows have a major fixation with the prefix My. I mean, it’s not even true. It’s just a bunch of bits residing in an EXE file on my HDD, not pics of my (non-existent) dog, that I cherish.

Anyway, to get to the point (and to mock those who haven’t already figured it out), MyDefrag is a program to clean up that hard drive of yours. It’s an important and popular fact that the data on an average Joe’s hard drive closely resembles a pile of sick. You can never quite make out, without knowing beforehand, what Joe had for breakfast, from the pile of aforementioned sick. Also, you never want to see it again, and like is the mentality of most homo sapiens, want to turn away and pretend it’s somebody else’s problem.

Joe suffers the most from this problem.

Even if somehow, Joe realised that all his files looked like swiss cheese, and his hard disk was wishing it were dead, he would simply turn to Windows’ default defragmenting tool, which would simply said everything was fine, and Joe would be happy, till his hard disk crashes the next day.

So, defragmenting is very important for a good healthy system. It decreases chances of your hard disk going t**s up and also has a reasonable impact on system performance.

Now let me explain the process of fragmentation in detail. In an ideal world, all files stored on your hard disk would be stored in a continuos fashion i.e. in one piece. Suppose you need to modify that file, but there’s no space immediately after that file. In that case, your file is in two parts, and this means that the hard disk has to work harder to get you your stuff.

Now what most defragmentation software do is that they simply jam the two piece together by finding an empty space on the hard drive large enough to store the two pieces of the file together. But this really isn’t all that good, because all this does is create two smaller gaps, where the files originally were. And when you put files in them, they’re likely to get fragmented as well.

Cue AusLogics Disk Defrag

Yikes!

Auslogics is an Australian company which makes a load of system optimization software, of which some are free.

Disk Defrag is easy to setup and very straightforward. Once installed, launch it, and you will get a screen similar to the screenshot. Just select the drives you want to defragment and click on Defrag. Alternatively, you can choose to just analyze your disks first.

One important thing about this tool, is that it takes defragmentation back to the way it was pre-Vista. Vista didn’t even have a defrag tool you could use manually. I think it had some automatic system which was rubbish. 7 has a defrag system you can use, but no GUI to show exactly how bad the fragmentation really is. Even in XP, the horizontal graph showing the fragmentation wasn’t as great as 98′s tool.

Plus, after you’re done converting swiss cheese into fully formed files, it even generates an HTML report for you, so you can see which files couldn’t be defragmented and why (eg. due to low disk space or insufficient privileges)

You can also schedule defragmenting sessions to be held overnight, which is helpful. Plus, this can turn defragmentation into a passive maintenance process, which is the way it should be.  You can also choose to defrag a particular folder/file, which is a new feature I’ve never come across before.

On the whole, it’s a brilliant program, and I’m sure to recommend it to anyone I meet, including the ravenous bugblatter beast of traal, assuming it uses a computer…

Tags: Auslogics, Reviews, Software, Windows