I been using this tool for aeons - in my experience its just like cleaning out yr fridge or better yet toilet bowl. how often depends on the usage of the pc. cos if u use ur computer like for almost evrything 24/7 then u shud defrag more frequently. generally by an avg user once every 4 weeks or a month shud do the trick. altho some ppl wud say its not neccesary.
No I never leave it running 24/7 except on a few occasions. I likely forgot to reset the scheduled maintainence to something else like sunday night at 1am when the av program runs the weekly sweep. I now have that set for sunday rather then wednesday at 8pm to run ahead of the av program's own scheduled time.
As you can see right away from this despite all the activity on these drives the scheduled run isn't a necessary daily event and can even be put off onto a monthly schedule. The Windows Task Scheduler following the June 12 clean install simply set the day and time to run the defrag automatically.
The Defraggler program is still a great one to have onhand by the way if you ever decided to uncheck the scheduled run on one or more drives or all drives and then find a level of fragmentation has come up. The small app there does run quite fast when compared. The thing is with the defrag tool already scheduled I never have to use it!
As for how high you would ever want to allow any fragmentation to go you wouldn't want to see any while I've seen upwards of 11% or more on older XP builds and then manually ran the defrag to clean things up unfortunately before the Defraggler program came out. That was sssslowww in those days even slower on 9x despite being smaller drives.
Now for the programs out there there aren't too many freebies while most are free. But there are some paid for programs like System Mechanic for a hefty price that include a defrag option. For server applications you may tend to find more programs that offer the automatic startup once a certain level of fragmentation is reached. All programs however are geared to reduce down to 0% when possible or down as far as can be if not seeing a 100% total defrag.
Defragging in w7 is less important to performance that is was in XP or Win 9x. It does still keep the system running smoothly as possible.
Defragging a SSD (Solid State Drive) is not recommended though. w7 will automatically disable the auto defrag when it detects one in the system.
A good 3rd party defrag is Puran Defrag Free, it will work well with the w7 files system. It has the option to run a boot time defrag too.
Why wudd u not recommend defragging an SSD ?
It's not my recommendation. Defragging causes writes and reads to a SSD which increases wear on the nand cells which have a limited number they can have before they become unusable. In practice, it may not wear out a SSD but preformance will slow.
Read: Why you should not defrag an SSD - ever: PC Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review
Ahh thanks Britton - havent had much exp with an SSD as its very expensive here about 1k per unit for like 60GB or something pretty ridiculous. So we rarely use it
+1 Gary especially when you see a lot of the stuff is manufactured there and you would half think the stuff would be a slightly less because of the negligible shipping even if it came from say Thailand.
To Jack though if you are concerned re the integrity of the drive/s the there are tons of stuff to test them with and one I use is the surface test wit Partition Wizard - a handy tool in itself and free!
Partition Manager Server, server partition manager and partition magic server for Windows Server 2000/2003/2008. Server Partition software for Windows Server and None-Server partitions
What gets me is how easy it was to forget to run the defrag's analyze option since in the past right after any clean install of Windows as well every so often that would be something I would do automatically to keep up with things.
With the Prefetch and other things that followed the Legacy days and with Vista/7 bringing in improvements the most I have seen as far as the level of fragmentation over the last several years was 11% on one old drive and then remedied fast just by running the defrag tool itself. On other occasions any fragmentation was limited to files not the drive itself until eventually the files were either dumped or replaced over time like a fresh download for some program as an example.
As for the Puran site I would need to spend some time looking over what they have there before being able to recommend any of their app there. It seems one main program called Puran Utilities is what you get which wraps up several tools in one main package over Defraggler which is a totally separate one purpose only program.
Yup, only the free Puran Defrag.
Puran Defrag Download
Highly recommended by GregRocker.
I just installed it, be careful you don't install the Bablon Search Bar, it is UNchecked by default.
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