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Diskeeper Keeps NT Flying

By Serdar Yegulalp.

Diskeeper 4 keeps the same look and feel you probably appreciated in prior versions. Changes to this version, including swap-file defragging, are confined to the program's innards. The result is an excellent utility that's downright indispensable.

The program's basic operations haven't changed. Diskeeper defragments any FAT or NT File System (NTFS) drive on a Windows NT system, either on demand or in the background at prescheduled intervals. It also lets you defragment NTFS directory structures and page files, although you can only do that at boot-up. Plus, you can set the program to consolidate all boot-time files at the front of the disk to accelerate startups. I ran Diskeeper on my 4GB NTFS partition drive, which had been running unoptimized for the better part of a year, and got a giant kick in both booting speed and application performance. Diskeeper's background defragging is great.

Diskeeper also provides analysis and feedback on the severity of a drive's fragmentation. It offers recommendations on how often to run defrags and whether boot-time consolidation will be useful.

A manual organization feature is missing from the program. When I tried to move certain files to specific locations (for example, all documents to the middle of the disk), Diskeeper wouldn't let me. You can, however, exclude drives or partitions from automatic defrags (a good idea if you often change removable drives).

Norton Utilities 2.0 for NT 4 also has a defragger, but it's vastly inferior and hasn't been updated recently. Diskeeper earned its stripes as the best NT defragger; version 4 replaces the previous version on our WinList. You can download an eval copy from here or look for a stripped-down version in Win2000 later this year.

Pros : Defrags page files; consolidates directory spaces; speeds up boot time

Cons : No manual directory-organization feature