I'm quite obsessive about keeping things running smoothly, so I regularly defrag my hard disks.
Until recently I would use MyDefrag
http://www.mydefrag.com < Web site seems to be down at the moment. Alternative URL for download :
http://www.filehippo.com/download_mydefrag/But MyDefrag seemed to be getting a bit long in the tooth, and hadn't been updated for some time. So I recently switched to SmartDefrag
http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html which seemed to finish faster, and has added feature of boot-time defrag for files that are immovable when Windows is running (pagefile, registry etc).
Last week I installed the new Internet Explorer 10 on my Windows 7 PC, and since then it's taken longer to boot, and whilst doing so there was a noticeable increase in disk thrashing.
Running SmartDefrag didn't seem to alleviate this, yet it was reporting 0% fragmentation.
I assumed that this slower, noisier boot was just a feature of Internet Explorer 10, and cursed Microsoft.
However, last night I left MyDefrag running overnight (it took a LONG time!) and today, the PC boots up with far less disk thrashing, and seemingly faster too. (Annoyingly, I hadn't measured a "before" boot time, but it
feels faster).
MyDefrag is completely free, SmartDefrag is supported by in-app adverts. One other thing to note is that SmartDefrag installs with various automatic background defrag features switched on, which you might not want.
Having noticed the improvement today, I think I'm going back to MyDefrag, especially since my main goal is a faster and "smoother" running machine, not speed in completing a defrag.
I assume my improvement is down to MyDefrag having a better algorithm for placing related and regularly used files close together on the disk.
Does anyone have any other "favourite" defrag utilities, and their reasons for liking them?
Ian