Diskeeper Pro Premier 2007

Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier is a system tool designed to help you keep your hard drives 'in shape' by recursively defragmenting them and thus keeping your computer's performance at its peak.

Now, most of you know that defragmenting your drives is an operation that needs to be done from time to time in order to maintain your Windows OS performance at a high level. Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier helps you defragment your drive by running as a background service or by manually starting the defragmentation process. When running in the background, the program will defragment your drive during idle time, thus consuming fewer system resources. A manual defragmentation will keep your disks busy, so it is preferable that you do that with as many stopped processes as possible.

Using the program is quite easy. You can either start the automatic defragmentation process and let it run in the background with default options or you can manually perform maintenance tasks. This means that you can analyze your disks and get information about what needs fixing. For example, besides defragmenting my drives, I chose to allow the program to reconfigure the Master file table on the system volume to the correct size. You can also create a list of exceptions, disable auto defragmentation when running on battery power (for laptops/notebooks) and consolidate directories on all volumes.

An interesting feature of this program, among others, is I-FAAST - Intelligent File Access Acceleration Sequencing Technology. It improves file creation and access by up to 80% on NTFS volumes. I-FAAST defragmentation can be enabled only when only available when Automatic Defragmentation is enabled on a volume. Among other very useful settings, I must mention 'Boot-time defragmentation' - defragmenting of files which can't be moved safely while Windows is running, at boot time; event logging and command line operation.

The interface has a very modern design and it's easy to use. However, beginners are advised to take a look at the 'Quick Start Guide' or 'Help' section. A quick access is also provided by the 'Quick Launch Pane'

Pluses: Command line access; the large variety of defrag and optimization tools.

Drawbacks / flaws:

In conclusion: An excellent disk utility, definitely worth a try. Extremely useful for large disks.

version reviewed: 11.0.703.0