O&O Defrag is by far the best in my opinion for many reasons which I don't have time to list right now. But I highly recommend it.
Also, be sure to check out Acronis products. They make the best Backup/Restore/Disk Utilities out there. Their software is extremely reliable and easy to use.
After I read about O&O it became the first 3rd party defragger I tired, but unfortunately after repeated installation attempts it just would not run on my computer which is too bad because it sounds like a great program.
~Maxx~
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The biggest problem with the built in windows defragger is that using it only guarantees the HDD will become fragmented more quickly after its finished.
....and then there's the fact that the UI has been dumbed-down so much that only the most completely moronic users can stand it..... no options, no indication of progress or time until it's finished.. just that stupid spinning circle?
I think a weekly defrag is OVERKILL to the 10th degree. In my opinion, people spend way too much time and effort in defragging hard drives in an attempt to increase or maintain performance and I just don't agree that it is necessary.
Unless you are doing a massive amount of file deletes on a regular basis...your disks are probably not becoming very fragmented at all.
I would say to defrag about every 3 months.
Well third party defraggers are usually free, they are faster and may offer more info about what's going on such as detailed color charts of the defragging activity, defrag reports and some of them even claim "smart" technologies that make disk defrag even better than Windows' own utility.
Some defraggers are even integrated into single apps along with other tweaking utilities such as a disk cleaner and performance optimizer.
I've tried just about all the available defraggers on Win7.64 and my general conclusion is that so far, none of the 3rd party ones seem to get it dead right. They may do a better job overall but they always make bootup take longer in my experience, sometimes twice as long compared with a Win7 setup that's been optimised with xbootmgr, part of Microsoft's Windows Performance Toolkit. The built in MS defragger doesn't have this problem, but on the downside it's slow as molasses completing a defrag compared with some and doesn't have the optimisations of 3rd party defraggers that boost general performance (after bootup that is).
Testing in my own little way between Windows 7 built in defragger and 3rd party defragger is a little bit of time, about 2 min. Windows 7 being slower. Of course W7 doesn't have the little colored boxes jumping around. Another thing that I have found that no two defrag program do it the same way. You can defrag with one and check with another and there will always be a slight difference. So I stick with Windows 7 built in. I'm of the belief that Microsoft should be able to defrag Window 7 as well as any or maybe better. If you choose W7 defrag you can check every now and again by using the analyzer part of the program first to see if you need to defrag. For what ever reason on my computer, Windows 7 Home Premium doesn't seem to get fragmented much at all. In a month it's 1 to 2 %. It can be scheduled to run in the back ground or on demand if that is what you like.
You are right that different Defraggers use different algorithms. The My Defrag software that I use first uses Wrap Around Defragmentation for files for which it can find large enough gaps and then use Data Shuffling for files that are bigger than the largest gap.
The last time I defragmented the 23 GB on the Win 7 partition it was analyzed at 6% fragmentation and it took MyD 14 seconds to completely defrag it...
Combined with the execution of MyD's 'sort by last access' disk optimization script which took 14 minutes to complete all of my programs open faster including the 1 GB GIMP Image Management Program program which used to open in 6 seconds and now opens in 3.42 seconds which is 43% faster than before MyD optimization which for me constitutes a very noticeable and welcomed improvement.
~Maxx~
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