In recent months there has been some buzz about SSDs, otherwise known as Solid State Drives. Performance from some of these drives is better than their mechanical counterparts. With access times in the nanosecond range its no wonder they appeal to speed junkies. But for the rest of us who either don’t have the cash or can’t upgrade an older machine. For example, that old IDE laptop you got sitting around. Fortunately there are some things you can do to give your old clunker a little more zip. One thing is to defrag your hard drive. Before I found my current defragmentation program, I used Defraggler from Piriform. It however was too slow for me. It would move a few blocks and then sit there and think about what to move next. I’m not really a waiting kind of person. So I started looking for something new. That’s when I found Auslogics Disk Defrag.
Auslogics Disk Defrag is much faster than Defraggler and does a lot more. It is able to defragment multiple disks at once and it has an auto defrag function to defrag the hard drive when the computer is idle. Now I know this function is built-in to the windows defragging program, but with Auslogics you can specify the parameters for idleness. On my machine there is always a program running that occasionally uses more than 10% of the CPU, which is what windows considers idle. This causes the windows auto defrag to never run so having the option enables me to fix that problem. The drive map was neat but not to much different from Defraggler. However you can change the color theme to match another program. Since I was used to my old program I chose the Defraggler theme.
The only downside to Auslogics Disk Defrag is that it has some advertising for their other products in the program. The system health function doesn’t actually do anything that I can tell. I think it just spits out a random number to get you to download their System Cleaner program. I use CCleaner for that, which is a great program from Pirifrom.
So if you have an old clunker like me and are looking for ways to put some umph back into it without dropping some cash for an upgrade. Then Auslogics Disk Defrag is a free and fast alternative. It does wonders for my virtual machine disk files. You can download it at http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/
