One of the easiest ways to make your PC run faster is to defragment your files. What does that mean? Well, Windows XP is notorious for storing segments of files in various locations, every time you create, modify or delete a file, it is further fragmented, and Windows has to spend more time trying to collate the pieces together before it can open, edit or delete it. Windows Vista has partially solved this problem, as it defragments in the background and thus your PC doesn't slow down. Raxco has launched PerfectDisk to solve your defragmentation problems.

Style and Features

The latest edition has got rid of the menu bar and comes in a ribbon style, a la Office 2007. The Wizard driven setup that lets you schedule and run the defragmentation process with ease. This feature makes defragmentation less intimidating to new users. Apart from defragmenting drives, PerfectDisk could be used to free up space by deleting files in your Recycle bin and temporary folders. Raxco also takes care of offline defragmenting, which is simply a fancy name for those files that can only be defragmented when the drive is not being used by Windows, for instance, the Master File Table, Metadata, Hibernate and Paging files. Thus, these selected files will be defragmented on reboot. A new component is Space Explorer, which displays a pie chart like a bird's eye view of your drive. It allows you to see the large folders and files that mostly eat up your hard drive space.



Performance
We tested it on our machine, which
is agonizingly slow, considering the number of softwares we install and uninstall in a week. After PerfectDisk 'Analyses' the drives, in addition to the normal tiny-bits drive map, it also displays a pie chart of the current state of your defragmented drive. Apart from this, it tells you the estimated time to defragmentation, and offers a bar graph of your drive's performance before and after defragmentation. Bar graphs include percentages of 'Performance', 'File fragmentation' and 'Free space fragmentation'. Finally, call up the 'Statistics' where you can view your most fragmented files, and your performance and free space charts. There are three ways that you can defragment, with Raxco's patented 'SMARTPlacement' which boasts of 15-20 percent less memory consumption, free space consolidation and defragment only. Since, SMARTPlacement combines both free space consolidation and defragmentation; we scheduled PerfectDisk to run this while the office shut down for the day.

How well did it perform? Well, there was a noticeable improvement in performance. The document files that were used to write software reviews were high up on the 'Most fragmented file' list, and Word definitely opened those faster. A feature that caught our eye was 'Stealth Patrol', which basically runs PerfectDisk in the background and defragments the drive whenever the computer is idle, so if you keep your PC idle while you go off to get a little snack, it will run quietly in the background, and you can access it from a system tray icon and switch it off if you need, but it doesn't slow down the PC, and is not a memory hog-right now its consuming barely 6 percent of our PC's physical memory.

FOR: Easy to use, exceptional defragment tool, with wizard driven setups and free space explorer.

AGAINST: A home or personal user may find the price a bit steep and would prefer to use the default Windows defragmenter.