Hello, I recommended Defraggler to my friend, who does not know a whole lot about computers, and she asked me what exactly does Defraggler do. I use Defraggler and O&O Defrag, and have been using defragmentation utilities for years, but I wasn't sure how to give her a simple answer. I explained that over time, a computer running Windows will have files that are "stored" in places that aren't the best and that some things may get fragmented, so these applications will help put those items back in the right place.

Can someone offer a better newbie explanation? Perhaps it would be better if I could tell her exactly what the end result for her would be, as in what differences will she notice after running one of these utilities. Thank you.

Information on a hard drive is stored sequentially, in that files are stored one after the other with no spaces between them. When you need to increase a file's size, it would be ridiculous to shift all files following to make room, files are modified all the time, should a hard disk need to adjust the location of numerous files at every write, performance would be exponentially reduced and the drive would be under (almost) constant load. Same can be said for file size reductions, the files following would need to fill the gaps every time something is erased. Seeing as constant adjustments are impractical, information added onto a file is placed at the end of the data (or in a blank space), this separation is known as a file fragmentation. As aforementioned, the spaces arise when a file is deleted. Rather than take the unpractical on-the-fly approach, we have defragmenters...which take care of the accrued splits and spaces.

Recent evaluations have found minimal to moderate fragmentation to not effect performance tremendously; however, serious fragmentation can be problematic (See Maximum PC; June 2008).

Defragler ( defragging ) is like the game Jenga

If you have played it you know how eventually unstable the structure becomes.

So Defragler ( defragging ) moves the blocks ( data ) around on the hard drive so that there are no gaps making application and data access faster.

And now (at least I never noticed it before) Defraggler will, during a complete defrag, pull out files, putting them at the end of the disk and replace them later so they are contiguous. Continuing the Jenga analogy, Defraggler will take apart what it needs to of the tower and then rebuild it as apposed to limiting itself by keeping everything intact. I could be wrong but I do not recall the graphical representation of the hard drive showing anything like that before this last version.

Hello mastavic,
Welcome to the forum!!!
You are a good friend and valuable member.
Have your friend use this link and use it first hand.They will learn a valuable lesson from you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Searc...arch=&go=Go Bookmark and save to Favorites.
Tell them to search for "defragmentation".
Advise them not to do this too often.Otherwise they will not benefit from the disk optimization strategies
built into Windows.
Also they may see a slow down initially for a short while but this will go away.
Most users see improved performance right away.

Good luck,
davey

Thank you for all the replies. These analogies, definitions, and examples helped a great deal =)

Hi Folks,

At present I am most happy to use on my several XP home & XP Pro computers a combination of two
defragmentation softwares: 1. Defraggler ( for very fast in between defragmentation like after downloading DVD movies or other video files) 2. Windows XP Disk Defragmenter ( it does very well the optimization of empty spaces between the many files - which the defraggler is not doing)

The Defraggler is used whenever material was added or removed from the harddisk.
The Windows Disk Defragmenter only when too many files are spread all over the harddisks. It looks better.

I use one computer to try out the newest updates before they go on to the other PCs.
The latest Defraggler I have not tried yet. Ther are just too many things to do.

During the last many years I'd say to have tried out pretty much all the defragment software around,
like Norton's, O&O, Perfect Disk, Disk Keeper, JK Defrag and many others. Freeware and Shareware.
Many of them a bit slow, some too overzealous that afterwards certain programs gave problems and only after the Windows Disk Defragmenter re-ordered the file structures , it worked again.

Then I read in some forum that a few longtime users had done the the same experiments over time and all recommended staying with the Windows built-in Disk Defragmenter. It has it's ovious shortcomings but is reliable and never causes problems. It's good enough for the average user. Naturally in a business oriented culture there are always people trying to sell us products we don't really need.

I also don't like programs which demand one's life commitment to learn und upkeep. If I don't use a program for a few months I don't want to learn it anew everytime I need it (what does this icon mean, etc.)

I love the CCleaner and when the Defraggler came along I tried it - and it was love at first sight. Bravo!

Once the Russian Kalashnikov was asked what he thinks why his weapon became worldwide so successful:

" We learned not to move away from the principles of SIMPLICITY and RELIABILITY"

happy computing to all of you - yogida

The defragger tool in xp is indeed quite good. But the one in vista sucks!
Mayor problem, to me, is that you can't see how much longer it will take.. it's just defragging, and all you can do is wait.
nothing in this tool is visual: you cannot see the fragmented files, not even a percentage of what is defraggmented.