37 replies to this topic

[Mudd]

I have recently had to reformat and I'm trying to get thing straight. I remember reading about Diskeeper Lite being part of a program download on something that I can't remember.

Someone mentioned that you could downland the application, extract/move the Diskeeper Lite from it. I did that and thought this one was far more informative than the Diskeeper Lite Freeware on their site.

Am I spinning my wheels here? I'm so sure I read it on this Forum. Have searched without success. Would someone put this old fellow on the right track?

[pwillener]

Not quite sure what you are trying to say. Diskeeper Lite can be downloaded from various places, including MajorGeeks. Executive Software (now Diskeeper Corporation) does no longer offer the free Diskeeper Lite product.

[Mudd]

Thanks for the reply. I'm aware of what you wrote.

Somewhere on a Forum, and I thought it was here, discussion was made about another option. There was a Program download and don't remember at all what the name was, that included a version of Diskeeper Lite that is different than the one available as a free download. One was to download the entire Program and then search the folders for the Diskeeper, download it and delete the rest because the cost was high for all of it.

I did that and the Diskeeper Lite is slightly different. Gives different screen windows and has more options.

I'm beginning to believe it was another Forum.

Again, thanks for the reply.

[DjLizard]

One thing to note is that Diskeeper Ultra-lite is part of Windows already: Start > Run > dfrg.msc

Help > About

Windows Disk Defragmenter
Copyright © 2001 Microsoft Corp. and Executive Software International, Inc.

hehe...

[Mudd]

But, don't you think that the Diskeeper Lite is much faster than the XP Defrag? Seems to me it is.

[Andavari]

I personally see no reason to even use Diskeeper Lite or Pro, or whatever they're calling it as DJLizard has already stated the "Ultra Lite" version is already a part of WinXP and in itself it's rather powerful if you use the command line version.

Get crafty and create some batch files to do all your defragging and you won't have to look at an GUI'd app whatsoever, heck you can even have Windows shutdown, restart, or log off itself with no envolvement whatsoever other than running the batch file you've saved.

I don't know about the Diskeeper version being faster than the WinXP version since my system always defrags each disk in either a few short seconds or few short minutes - but then again I defrag so often neither of my disks have time to get too fragmented.

One app to definately add to WinXP's defrag capabilities is Sysinternals PageDefrag (freeware) hence it can quickly defrag files that are in-use during a Windows session during bootup.

[Mudd]

Thank you. I will try the program you mentioned.

[DjLizard]

It's also important to note that frequent defragmenting reduces the lifespan of the disk, removes the possibility of recovering deleted files, and generally does not increase visible performance (it does, but it's in the order of nanoseconds to milliseconds, even in extremely fragmented cases).

As a tech, I always recommend that customers defragment only once a year. Pretty surprising, huh?

[Mudd]

Very surprising! Not that I question you at all, but many Tech people from other sources will give you many different answers. Like, daily, weekly, monthly, when the system seems to drag, etc. I can see where excessive activity can wear mechanical devices and defrag must be one of them. But how much does it wear as opposed to what a lot of people think that a fragmented hard disc has to work more to read a fragmented file? Doesn't a heavy fragmented disc require the head reader to move around more while searching for the complete file?

Please accept that I'm not qualified to dispute you. Just asking some questions that I don't know the answer to.

Thanks for your post.

[DjLizard]

That's fine, I'm here to help.

Well, most drives spin at 7200 RPM (some more, some less) which is enough to make the drive fight gravity. You can pick up a drive that is spinning that fast, and while holding it horizontally, tilt it left and right and feel the G-force it gives off. The typical access time from random sector to random sector is between 5 to 15 milliseconds because of the great speed at which it spins, combined with the precision servo motor controlling the head and actuator, and then depending on which zone of the platter the heads are in. The inner zone has quicker seek time because it is a shorter circumference, and the outermost zone of the platter has a much greater circumference. I would guess that the travel time from the inner zone to the outer, or vice versa, is probably around 20-25 milliseconds (I don't have a source for that data, that's just my guess). But I know it's faster than a blink.

A hard drive head is typically 0.3 by 1.2 millimeters. Pretty sick, huh? Not to mention that there are multiple heads reading multiple platters.

Next, you have to take into account the internal RAM that modern drives have, and their new "lookahead" features that allow the drive to read data into the buffer in anticipation of a data request. By the time the computer sends the request for the next section of data, the drive is ready to pass the section from its internal buffer back to the bus. The bigger the cache your drive has, the more apparent this effect is. I personally have gone from 0 cache to 8 MB of cache and just a simple bootup of Windows was stunningly fast. (I had ghosted my drive to a new one - I got to see the difference immediately after the ghost, and it was very obvious). Now, drives are loaded with up to 16 MB of cache.

Finally, most modern operating systems have lazy write features where the OS can defer disk writes until an appropriate time (like when the bus and CPU are not so congested). Combining these things (and more that I haven't even mentioned) gives you a nice representation of the speed you are dealing with. Typical modern hard drive transfer rates are between 30 to 50 megabytes per second. At 50 MB/s, an entire CD's worth of data can be handled in about 14 seconds.

Defragmenting frequently speeds up your computer on the order of nanoseconds, and frequent defragmentation will cause platter defects sooner. I'm also fairly certain that hard drives last longer while spinning than they do while not, and that is just one reason I keep my computer on 24/7.

[Mudd]

That was informative! Thanks for the detailed description of how things work. That brings up another subject, like Turn Off or Leave On. I'm not going to ask about that. I've got enough information in your previous post to give my old Grey Matter a good workout.

Thanks for that.

[Andavari]

I've heard that frequent defragging can shorten the life of a hard disk. I've also read from VoptXP's website a few years ago back when they had documentation available that keeping a drive defragged increases the life since it doesn't have to search the disk for files separated by fragmentation. It's that Yes and No that confuses allot of people which sticks us into the grey area.

All I know is I defrag everyday and have done so for the past 6 or 7 years and it hasn't (knock on wood) caused me any grief as of yet.

[pwillener]

 Mudd, on Apr 4 2006, 10:11 PM, said:

Somewhere on a Forum, and I thought it was here, discussion was made about another option. There was a Program download and don't remember at all what the name was, that included a version of Diskeeper Lite that is different than the one available as a free download. One was to download the entire Program and then search the folders for the Diskeeper, download it and delete the rest because the cost was high for all of it.

I did that and the Diskeeper Lite is slightly different. Gives different screen windows and has more options.

I'm beginning to believe it was another Forum.

Again, thanks for the reply.

Diskeeper Lite 7 was the last version made generally available. But there is a newer version available at the Intel website as part of their Desktop Utilities; I believe it is version 8 or 9. See http://www.intel.com...d/software/idu/ (I have read in another forum that if you have DK 7 Lite installed, you must uninstall it first before attempting to install the Intel Desktop Utilities).

The difference between Windows own defragmenter (provided by ExecSoft), the Diskeeper Lite version and the Pro version is

• Windows: defragments files only, sometimes partially when not much free space left, and extremely slow.
  
• Lite: defragments files only
  
• Pro: defragments files, MFT, page file, and folder file. It also has options to prevent fragmentation, e.g. by padding the MFT.

As for the merits of defragmentation; I have seen applications speeding up enormously after defragmenting a heavily fragmented HD.

I have set Diskeeper Pro to defragment my most heavily used partitions every night, and my systems keeps performing evenly year after year

[Mudd]

I'm getting out of this Diskeeper Lite thing. Just now I opened PWILLENER'S Post, saw what he was mentioning, selected the 14MB+ download rather than the 84MB+. Decided to give it a try. Clicked on the installer and, "Wham" went my PC. DOS like windows were popping up all over the screen. Monitor went blank, noticed the Tower light was now amber rather than green. Shut it down, waited 10 minutes an it still would not start. Tower light stayed amber.

Some where in the back of this old head I remember that somebody wrote on somewhere that a certain condition can occur on a PC that you will need to unplug the power for a few seconds, plug back in and it reset something. That's what I did and power is back.

I have to many miles on this old frame to go through things like this. I removed all the download, ran JV16 Registry Cleaner and all seems to be OK.

Going to stay right where I am, nothing new for me.

PWILLENER - Not to blame you. It was just probably a glitch in my PC.

Thanks everybody for the help. I'm gone!

[bpm3k]

 Mudd, on Apr 5 2006, 06:49 AM, said:

I'm getting out of this Diskeeper Lite thing. Just now I opened PWILLENER'S Post, saw what he was mentioning, selected the 14MB+ download rather than the 84MB+.
PWILLENER - Not to blame you. It was just probably a glitch in my PC.

You are correct not to blame pwillener. This was a case of user error. You downloaded the one that says "Hardware Monitor Only Version." Which is ONLY for monitoring some Intel motherboards (as you might guess from the title of the download and being on the "intel desktop" website).

Download "IDU_2.1.9.66.exe" it is the the 88.9MB file. Extract the file (it is a .zip).
Navigate your way here: IDU_2.1.9.66\3rdparty\Diskeeper
Double click on "setup.exe"

[Mudd]

[quote name='bpm3k' date='Apr 6 2006, 06:06 PM' post='35287']
(You are correct not to blame pwillener. This was a case of user error.)

bpm3k - Thanks for pointing this out. I never have, and probably never will intentionally criticize anyone that posts. I don't have the experience or knowledge to do such a thing. I don't think I will live long enough to do such a thing because of the limited no-how I have now.

Thank you for the explanation.

[pwillener]

Nothing to worry about; Mudd wrote that he did not blame me.

However, I do feel a bit stupid since I pointed out a software package that I did not try out myself (because I already have the full version of Diskeeper Pro installed).

But I see that forum user bpm3k has posted install instructions earlier, as well as in some other post, so I assume that the package installs without problems.

But I will go and test it anyway, somewhere on an unused VMware Windows partition.

[Mudd]

pwillener - I tried bpm2k's post and got what I was looking for. If had used good judgement and explored your post more I would not have had the trouble I had.

Thanks for giving me some rope on this.

[pwillener]

No problem at all

Also, every time we encounter some trouble, we also learn something. I certainly do...

[pwillener]

Downloaded the Intel Desktop Utilities package, extracted it, then installed Diskeeper Lite on another computer. Nice, clean install, and DK9 looks exactly as the DK9 Pro version I have installed on my computer (except that page file, MFT, and folders file defragmentation are disabled in the Lite version).