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> For any Win NT user, Diskeeper Lite sounds well needed and a true
> bargain.
I also downloaded DK Lite a few days ago, and I'm not quite as
impressed.
I ran it on my C drive (NTFS) which was fairly heavily fragmented.
It's 70% full (3GB out of 4.3), so there is 1.3GB free on it, and
there was a single contiguous 250MB free space on it due to moving my
VM swap space to the D drive just before running DK Lite.
Any decent defragger I've ever seen would have been able to
completely defrag this disk and create large free spaces. DKlite had
plenty of free space to work with, including the large contiguous
piece. But DK Lite couldn't fully defrag it, even after 7
consecutive defrags!! Furthermore, the first defrag, instead of
consolidating fragmented files in the large free space, splattered
the free space all over the disk and left many fragmented files
behind.
More troublesome, the information from the program was inconsistent.
DK Lite has an "Analyze" mode and a "Defrag" mode. Both report the
number of fragmented files and the number of "excess fragments."
Here are the results of running many A's and D's:
FragFiles ExcessFrags
A: 3600 52000 (TS4 database was in 3700 pieces.... :-)
D: 100 22178
A: (forgot to record this one)
D: 100+ 8000
A: 24 13000
D: 6 1312
A: 18 12103
D: 4 4102
A: 14 8003
A: 33 8346 (might have been a defrag between these?)
D: 2 37
A: 11 7934
D: "Can't defrag any further"
A: 14 7705
D: 4 109
A: 10 7596
I did some operations between some of these Defrag/Analyze cycles,
but not enough to cause that kind of variation. I always analyzed
immediately after the defrag finished, and the D & A answers were
always wildly different.
Meanwhile, the graphical display of the disk showed most of the disk
being fragmented, even after 7 defrag passes!
And on my D drive, the graphic Analysis display showed more used
(contiguous) files than empty filespace, even though there's only
1.9GB used and 6.8GB free on that drive! Then I ran a defrag on D
and most of the previously "used" space turned magically into "free"
space!?
For free, it's hard to complain too much. I suspect my disk is in
much better shape than it was before. The full version offers
important improvements, like the ability to run a defrag at bootup so
you can move/consolidate directories. And the DiskKeeper defraggers
have the VERY nice feature that they can supposedly defrag a file
even if it's open by another application. (Hence Ullrich's ability
to run it every night without shutting down TS.)
But I'm leery of buying the full-featured version if the freebie demo
acts this bizarre.
Gary
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