Product Reviews
Windows 2000 Defragmentation Tools: Defrag Commander Personal Edition
Five ways to fight the inevitable disk slowdown.
I've always admired the guys at Winternals because they really know their
stuff. They have come out with a number of products over the years that
have helped me tremendously. This piece of software, though, seems to
deviate from that pattern. Defrag Commander turns out to be little more
than an add-on to the built-in Win2K defragmenter that Microsoft provides.
Defrag Commander is faster and provides a few more features, but not as
many as other products.
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Pros: Fast
Cons: Very few features
Verdict: Not much more than an add-on to the built-in
defragmenter
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When you run the software you'll notice an icon in the left pane labeled
Defrag Commander PE andone labeled Disk Defragmenter. The first icon will
display a listing of drives that you can analyze and defragment. If you
click on the second icon you'll be presented with a screen that looks
almost exactly like the built-in defragmenter from Microsoft. If you right-click
a disk and select defragment, the process that begins looks exactly the
same as the Microsoft tool as well. This process is faster and more thorough
than the built-in tool and it seems to consolidate free space. Figure
1 shows Defrag Commander in action.
Defrag Commander also allows you to schedule defragmentation, whereas
the built-in tool does not. If you select the Defrag Commander PE icon
and right-click a disk in the right pane you'll be given the option to
schedule defragmentation. This can be done at low or high priority, and
at any time of the day. Be careful though: I could not find a way to remove
a schedule except by having it expire. Figure 2 shows the task-scheduling
interface.
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| Figure 1. Defrag Commander bears a striking resemblance
to the built-in defragmenter from Microsoft. (Click image to view
larger version.) |
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| Figure 2. Defrag Commander lets you schedule
one-time or periodic defragmentation for your drives. |
Because the system files are always open, they cannot be optimized while
the system is running. For this reason, most other defragmentation tools
offer you the capability to perform an offline defragmentation of the
system files. Not here; the only way to defragment the paging file is
to download a piece of freeware from Winternals called PageDefrag, and
even then you cannot defragment the numerous other system files that require
optimization.
If you're just a home user without a lot of money this may be a viable
piece of software for you since it does run on Windows 2000/NT/98/ME.
But if you're a serious user who wants a fast system, you should consider
other options.
About the Author
Joseph L. Jorden, MCSE, MCT, CCNA, CCDA is Chief Technical Officer for Dugger & Associates (www.Dugger-IT.com). He was one of the first 100
people to achieve the MCSE+I and one of the first 2,000 to become an MCSE under Windows 2000. Joseph frequently contributes to books from Sybex and various periodicals.