defragger : Java Glossary

• Supports XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64.
• It has come a long way since I first tested it in 2005.
• If you let it do a boot-time defrag, it can defrag everything, even system files like the MFT (Master File Table), pagefile.sys, $Logfile, hiberfile.sys, $USN ChangeJournal…
• I have not done a formal benchmark, but this feels like the fastest defragger.
• It claims monitors file use between defrags to figure out which files you use most often. I suspect this is not true. I can see so sign of any service doing such monitoring. I think all they means in they turn on the OS last-access tracking. They are thus tracking when files were last used, but not how often. The most used files it moves to the prime real estate near the edge of the disk. If this were true, it would be an incredibly brilliant feature. I have not noticed any major improvement in performance after using it.
• The defrag is remarkably quick, either the auto or recency mode.
• It offers you a choice of you seven basic algorithms, basically trading off precision for speed. It has many sub options.
• The manual is excellent, explaining not only the Disktrix program, but how hard disks and defraggers work. It explains what defraggers attempt to do and why.
• The GUI (Graphic User Interface) is responsive. You can query where various files are or what files are in various clusters, even while it is defragging.
• The GUI is compact, easy to understand and easy to read.
• If you want, you can precisely control the placement of individual files.
• It, at least psychologically, appears faster than other defraggers, though I have not benchmarked it.
• It collects the directories and puts them in prime real estate.
• The Ultimate version lets you configure 6 different defrag strategies. The express version gives you no choices.

• When I tried the boot defrag option it made my computer unbootable. I was able to recover in an hour or two with my purchased copy of Windows-7. It would not have recovered with the copy of the OS that came with the computer that has no repair facilities. I suspect the problem was an incompatibility with Boot-It Bare Metal boot manager or O & O defragger.
• The number of possible tweaking options for the defrag are overwhelming. The documentation tells you what they do, but not when you might want to use them. However, you can just ignore them and click AUTO and still get a very sophisticated algorithm.
• Disktrix refuses to answer emails until you register the product. They don’t seem to understand that customers don’t register a product until it is working satisfactorily. It is not as if potential customers can bum free support, get the product working, continue to use it and then not pay.
• You can’t tell it to defrag several partitions and walk away. You must defrag them one at a time.
• It has no command line interface, though it does have a scheduler. I studied how the Disktrix uses the Windows scheduler and deduced that the following kludge should let you trigger one of the predefined scheduled jobs from the command line. However, it did not work.

  rem start Disktrix predefined job 00
  F:
  cd "F:\Program Files (x86)\Disktrix\UltimateDefrag"
  Udefrag.exe /schedule "Defrag Job #00"
  rem -30-

  . When the scheduler triggers a run, just the cluster inspector comes up. There is no way to stop the program or interact with it or see what it is doing.
• When DiskTrix moves lesser-used files to the inner tracks, it moves them to the absolutely remotest innermost slowest tracks. There is no need to go to this extreme. It just slows down access.
• It spends most of its time tweaking the positions of rarely used archive files. It starts it work with the archive files, and only after they are done does it work on the important files. This means if you abort the run part way through, it will not have done the most important work. This is a bit like a housewife who starts first cleans the attic when guests are coming.
• When DiskTrix does a recency defrag, it puts the most recently used files along the outer rim. However, it puts all the free space in the center. Newly created files, the ones you use most, are thus relegated to the sub-prime real estate. It should leave an empty band near the outer rim.

• Pretty Toy Story-like 3D look and feel. Aimed at the naïve user. Fully automatic, almost no confusing options. Needs no configuration. A defragger is not going to do any good unless it is used. This defragger would be good to give to someone who is defragger-phobic. Visually this program stands head and shoulders above the competition. This was quite a surprise for me for a product coming from a company I was unfamiliar with.
• Your choice of about 30 different colour schemes.
• It claims to defrag all system files including the MFT, though the trial version does not do that.
• It is very quick. When you watch it work, you can see is not using the usual flat-footed sequential algorithm. However, they alarm you saying the first defrag could take over 24 hours.
• It has a mode called JetSmart which is disabled in the trial version. It suspect it is a more thorough defrag. The documentation is rather vague on what it is.
• The animated puppy is gone. Cute wears thin for me very quickly. The Microsoft paperclip gives me apoplexy when I can’t make it go away.
• It gives you the option or just defragging or of sorting files, but it gives no details on just what they mean by that.
• Will also defrag the registry (without pruning junk, just compacting deleted entries), and defrag memory. I presume by that they mean internally defragging pagefile.sys.

• The trial version is so severely hobbled that I was not able to test any of the serious features, such as MFT defrag. I don’t own a copy of the registered program.
• It defrags files, but it does not compact them to make all the space contiguous at the end. The Abelssoft people consider this an advantage. They figure compacting space “is a nightmare because if all files are stored next to each other then there is no space to grow. This means that your files will get fragmented very fast again, which will slow down the read processes quickly.” Space compacting speeds things up for files that are not growing. I prefer the ability to try things out various ways and see which works best in my particular circumstance for each partition. I segregate stable files in their own partitions where space compaction does pay.
• As the defrag progresses, it marks more and more squares unmovable. The number of unmovable clusters should be invariant. This may be a bug, or it may be a side effect of using such large display squares that cover so many clusters, e.g. caused by fragmented files being moved from a square containing an unmovable cluster changing the status of the entire square to unmovable.
• When it is done, it claims a partition is 100% defragmented when it is not, and I don’t mean the various unmovable files.
• When it is done, it marks half the squares used and half as contiguous. Surely if the drive is 100% defragmented, all the used squares should be marked either contiguous or unmovable. Maybe the labeling is at fault. Perhaps they mean “already contiguous” and “recently defragged”.
• The Ultimate version includes a few toys that have nothing to do with defragging.

• Particularly good at speeding up file copies.
• Defrags, free space, directories, MFT and pagefile.sys
• Moves dirs to centre of the disk.
• Has VmWare version called V-locity

• Very slow. Makes no attempt to position files by last access date.
• Directory, MFT and pagefile.sys optimisation can only be done at boot time.
• Boot time defrag can take 15+ hours and is not interruptible.
• The company has Scientology connections, which may cause trouble if you are in Germany.
• My computer was in my bedroom and it drove me nuts clicking away in the middle of the night after I installed Diskeeper. The only way I could get it to stop running was to uninstall it.
• Diskeeper claims that a badly fragmented MFT will double boot time and slow some apps by 50%. Software installs can take 5 times longer.
• They claim a badly fragmented page file can slow mouse response to 30 seconds. I find that improbable, unless it were a specially constructed pathological case.
• It claims to improve performance of SSD (Solid State Disk)s by a factor of 6, but I don’t see how it could possibly do that. Position of files on an SSD is supposed to have no effect on speed. Perhaps they use a traditional RAM (Random Access Memory) cache. But what would it do the built-in cache would not? perhaps compression.

• It is a complete hard disk suite, not just a defragger. It contains a partition manager, backup, restore and a tool to move part of the OS to SSD. It boasts 27 defrag strategies. They no longer sell the defragger separately.
• It can move the MFT to the start of the disk, defrag it, compact it internally, and shrink it. This is the main reason to buy Paragon. None of the other defraggers handle this crucial task. You can use it just for this.
• It automatically checks disk integrity before defragging. Defragging a corrupted disk would just make matters much worse.
• It is thorough. All files are in the advertised order, without embedded empty space and fully defragged when it completes. It does not leave an empty cluster between directories for future growth.
• Defrags paging files at boot time and directories online.
• It has disk monopoly access mode to prevent the system from attempting to move already defragmented blocks.
• It will put directories at the beginning/end and sort files by size or in order by last modification date, but not last access date.
• It appears to defrag the log and journal files, absolutely everything.
• It can create a recovery boot CD with crucial files on it. This is the major new feature of version 2010.

• You can defrag only one partition at a time. You can’t give it a list to defrag and walk away. Further you have to defrag/move the MFT, and compact the MFT separately from defragging the files. If you have four partitions, you will need 16 reboots to defrag the files and compact and defrag the MFTs. It is not 24, because the MFT s automatically get defrags when you defrag the files in a partition. You have to babysit it. Other defraggers you can wind up and come back the next morning.
• It will not order files by last access date, though it will order by size or last access date.
• The version 2009 would not touch my C: system NTFS partition. It says it is an unsupported partition type. Other defraggers have no trouble with it. I can’t see anything unusual about it. The Paragon support people said a byte in the partition table is wrong and needs to be manually patched. Tech support said to patch byte 0x26 to 0x80 in the boot sector, but I so far don’t have a tool that will let me do that. It is a fault in Acer computers. The purchased version does not have this problem. 2010 does not have it either.
• The boot time defragger sometimes just quietly terminates without an error message without doing any defragging.
• You can’t do anything else with the computer when it is defragging.
• You must reboot at the start and finish of each defrag. I was never able to get it to defrag online, except in safe mode. There was always some program using the partition.
• Every time you defrag you have to respecify the options: put directories at the end, do not sort by size, sort by ascending last access date. It forgets your previous settings.
• When you select the partition, the partitions are displayed showing the nested extended partition structure to scale, but they are not always labeled with drive letters. The display is further confused by showing Linux partitions and others it does not know how to defrag. It should just show a list of drive letters of defraggable partitions.
• The display during the defrag is just a progress bar. You have no idea what it is doing. You don’t know what file it is moving, or even which partition it is defragging.
• the time to finish has the alarming habit of getting bigger and bigger and freezing, instead of counting down at a steady pace. The program should estimate high, based on previous runs, and refine the estimated time to finish in such a way the time to finish always keeps getting smaller.
• The cluster display does not let you explore the disk. It tells you nothing about what is in the cluster or how it is being used.
• If you abort an operation in the GUI, you cannot start another. You have to exit and restart.
• The defrag display often says there are 2 MFT fragments, but when you go to defrag the MFT, it says there is only one and no defrag is necessary.
• It requires excessive hand-holding. It appears that it wants you to babysit it and hit space from time to time before it will get on with the next stage, but you can just let it sit for a while and eventually it starts up again on its own. It should be able to run unattended to defrag a group of partitions and shrink a group of MFTs. The boot time modules makes reference to a script, but I saw no documentation on how you might compose one.
• It is slow. I takes 3 hours to defrag my C: partition. Defrags on data partitions can be quite quick however.
• It has fast and safe modes. Fast mode does not guarantee your disk will be uncorrupted if there is a power failure. Further you can’t interrupt a defrag even with the esc key. This means you computer may be tied up 2 or 3 hours defragging a partition before you can use your computer again, no matter what. Fast mode is not particularly fast. In some circumstances it is slower. I would not recommend using it.
• The cluster display is misleading. It makes the disk look more fragmented than it really is.
• In general you must purchase new versions without any discount. You can get a discount, but you have to ask for it. Sometimes there is a free update.
• The sort for the internal defrag pass is slow, possibly an O(n²) insertion sort, though not outrageously slow. It would be almost instantaneous with a 16-bit RadixSort.
• The offline display quickly scrolls offscreen before you can read it with no way to scroll back to read it.
• The person who translated the prompts and labels from German to English made many errors. I sent a list of them to Paragon, but they refused to correct them. The errors are still there several versions later.
• The scan of the list of files sometimes just goes into an endless loop.
• The UI (User Interface) is hopeless about feedback. You can never tell if a command took. There may be no response or indication for 5 minutes or more.
• The information it displays about partitions does not include how badly the MFT is fragmented either externally or internally, so you don’t know if you need to defragment/compact.
• I uninstalled the trial Paragon 2009 and reinstalled Paragon 2007. However, now, none of the boot-time features work. Reinstalling Windows from scratch cleared the problem. I am now using Paragon 2010.

• I have not done a formal benchmark, but this feels like one of the slower defraggers initially. However, since it keeps together all files that have been recently modified, it also keeps together files most likely to become defragmented. It is thus very quick if you do frequent subsequent runs.
• This defragger targets the niche of very large disks where you must be quick and have to be parsimonious with RAM to get the disk defragged in reasonable time. It is faster than most other defraggers. It is particularly good at improving boot time. It optionally compresses small files. Places most frequently modified (not necessarily most frequently accessed) files near the center of the disk and rarely modified ones near the edges, with the free space in the central band. It will work with only 5% free space.
• I checked. Its boot time defrag handles absolutely all the metafiles. There is not a single fragmented file left when it is done!
• IT Pro Magazine gave it their 2008 editor’s choice award. CNET gave it five stars.
• It unusually good working in the background. It automatically backs off and lets you get work done in the foreground.
• Their online store takes credit cards, PayPal, cheque, money order or wire transfer. They also sell through dealers.
• If you get into the deeper menus, you can leave bands of empty space for files to grow into.
• The user interface is handsome done in nautical colours. Most of it, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with defragging. I think it would be best if the non-defragging stuff were pruned off into a separate utility. It is just confusing. The way they show fragmented clusters is ingenious.
• It has a simple command line interface:

  Rem Command line control of Raxco Perfect Disk
  rem /sp means smart placement, /w means wait
  "X:\Program Files\Raxco\PerfectDisk\PDCmd.exe" /sp C: D: E: F: G: /w

  Unfortunately, it gives you no progress information. Clusters disappear for minutes at a time. You can’t tell much about what it is doing or how far it has progressed by looking at the display. You can’t point at a cluster while it is defragging to find out which file it is to learn about how it works.

• The default colour scheme is well-chosen. I had no problem telling the various classifications apart.

• It gives you little control over how the defragging is done. It is a black box. You get to choose their proprietary Smart Placement option, defrag only or space compression. It uses only last modified time and file extension in deciding placement in its own proprietary way. If you are not a techie, this is a plus. You want it automatic. Deep in the menus you can do some tweaking, but the options amount to minor variants of the built-in ones.
• It does not fully defrag free space, or all the files. You have to run it two or three times to get everything defragged. Raxco claims this is a limitation of the NTFS defrag interface, though I doubt this. It could keep working till it was done, just as its competitors do. Earlier versions often went into an infinite loop, but it has not done that with recent versions. Leaves many files undefragged after a single pass.
• The prime real estate are the outer low-numbered tracks. Oddly, Perfect Disk puts the rarely changed files there. It should put them on the inner tracks.
• To defrag a disk you must find the drive letter and right click it. For heaven sake. Don’t hide the most important function!
• The graphic display does not keep up to date consistently as it works, but it has a window telling which file it is moving so you can at least tell it has not hung. The display just sits there most of the time, looks as if nothing is happening. The competition all produce hypnotic displays that seem fairly lively.
• If you shut down the program by clicking × the program does not stop, it just continues in the background as a system process eating up nearly all available CPU (Central Processing Unit) cycles. You can avoid this behaviour by using the stop icon to stop the program, though it seems to start itself and run at odd times even when you have not scheduled it too. You can’t get rid of the background service that runs all the time, however this is true of most defraggers.
• The dialog where you configure the options for how you want a given partition handled is cleverly hidden. The way you can access it is with a double click on the drive letter. If you do a defrag run, then run it again, and abort part way through, your disk will be messier than when you started.
• Raxco says it holds a patent on the idea of file placement. This is prior art and I can prove it to anyone who needs to break the patent. I posted the idea years ago on BIX (Byte Information Exchange).
• When you use the GUI to ask it to defrag several partitions, it defrags them simultaneously. This is not as efficient as defragging them one after the other.
• It takes two clicks to see the contents of a block (groups of clusters), and you can only view the contents when the defrag is stopped. It should take only one and it should work all the time, with snappy response.

Advantages

• This is what I decided to buy for myself. Five magazines gave it awards.
• Comes from Germany. You can let it work in the background waking up whenever the system is idle to do a little defragging. You can tune the algorithm to use. You can tune it to sort files alphabetically, to order for fast read access (sorted by last access date, its most logical algorithm in my opinion) or fast write access, or to defrag with minimal resources. It sorts by ascending last access date. Ideally it should sort by descending last access date to put the most frequently accessed files on the fast outer tracks near the beginning of the partition. It supports FAT, FAT32, NTFS, NTFS5, RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), EFS. Works even on drives larger than a terabyte. It has a scheduler so you can run the defrags unattended. It is clever enough to queue up a request to defrag a partition on the same disk as one being defragged, but will optionally simultaneously defrag a separate physical disk.
• They take credit cards and PayPal.
• The Complete/ACCESS algorithm has some nice features:
  • After the first use, it is relatively quick. It moves a few files you have not used in a while to the active end of the disk, creating holes. Then it rapidly slides files down to fill the holes. Often it does not even need to touch the first half of the disk.
  • It optimally organises the files so that the ones you use most often are near the active end of the disk and the ones you hardly ever use are near the beginning, perfectly sorted. No other defragger does this. Others use approximate bands or base the sorting on last modified date rather than last accessed date. This is the key reason I chose O&O for my own use. For this to work properly, you must first turn on last-access date maintenance with the fsutil utility.
  • You can think of it like a house with well-designed many-layered storage for commonly-used items, rarely-used items and an attic. Getting rarely-used files off to the attic reduces clutter.
  • It is equally important to get files used together close to each other on disk as it is to get the fragments of a files. This algorithm does that.
• It defrags the hibernate file and the registry. It can even defrag the registry without a reboot.
• The tech people get back to me within hours.
• You can control it from the command line, e.g.:
  rem defrag with COMPlete ACCess : C: D: E: F: G:
  OODCMD /COMPACC:C,D,E,F,G
  It works faster and more reliably in this mode. It stops immediately when you ask it to, unlike the GUI interface.
• In version 12.0 they introduced zones. You can specify three zones and which files belong in each zone. Zone 1 is for files that will not likely change. Zone 2 in for your main data files. Zone 3 is for caches and temporary files. It uses different algorithms to defrag each zone, Zone 1=Complete/Name, Zone 2=Complete/Access and Zone 3=SPACE. This speeds defragging, since three piles are easier to sort than one giant pile of files. It puts programs in the prime real estate of the outer band. I suspect they do this because this is where you get the maximum transfer rate — good for loading programs. The next band is data, and the innermost band is rarely used files in the least desirable real estate. You go back and forth between loading programs and processing data. It keeps all the parts of a given program together. It keeps the most active data together. Its file placement is the most intelligent of any defragger However, the overly wide empty space bands means needless extra head movement. You could ameliorate that defect by using a tool like BootIt NG to shrink your partitions to have just the minimum necessary free space.
• It gives you lots of statistics about the effect of defragging over the last few weeks.

Disadvantages

• The current version is buggy. The command line does not work at all. You have to use one version back.
• The most annoying feature is version 12 is the way it waits for a minute or two before rebooting. During that time it gives no indication it is busy/waiting.
• Another feature that annoys me in version 12, is that it displays file maps for all partitions even when it is defragging only one. It even shows maps for partitions not used by Windows. You can’t close any of the unwanted partition displays. This reduces the detail on what it is doing. You can temporarily override it by going into Automatic Settings ⇒ manual.
• In version 14+, you must select the drive before you specify your exceptions. If you specify any exceptions for some other drive, they will be quietly ignored.
• Your configured zones directories will be ignored unless you enable zone processing in a separate menu under: Settings ⇒ Drives ⇒ Advanced.
• When you install a new version, it will discard most of your configuration settings including your zone filings. The files that control this are not human-editable and presumably may change format between versions. All you can do is take a screenshot of your configuration and re-key it after you install the new version.
• In version 14, Defrag puts the directory entries for each zone contiguously at the head of each zone.
• It in incompatible with Copernic indexer. If you run them both at the same time, O&O will freeze frequently or exhibit strange behaviour. You must unload Copernic from RAM, not just turn off indexing, when 
  Even this does not stop version 12 from failing to connect with the background engine often. I have found adding a delay after unloading and loading the driver seems to work reasonably well prior to using OODCMD.exe.

  Rem OOR restart O&O Defrag background service
  net stop "O&O Defrag"
  rem give 3 seconds to stop.
  delay 3  /B
  net start "O&O Defrag"
  rem give 3 seconds to get loaded.
  delay 3 /B
  rem -30-

  Unfortunately, neither the GUI nor the command line version will run in safe mode because the background service engine won’t run.
• When defragging the C: drive, it sometimes seems to restart from the beginning over and over. I have every other application I can think of that might be interfering turned off.
• When you enter the registration key, it will ask for three fields, your name, your company and your registration key. In my case, to make it work I had to enter my company name in both the name and company field. This is odd given that I gave them both my name and company name during purchase and did not specify if it was an individual or corporate purchase.
• It seems to be quite slow the first time out. Like most defraggers, it is using the official Windows NTFS defragger interface. On subsequent runs, it is reasonably quick but still slower than some of the competition. I choose to use the Complete/ACCESS algorithm. My machine was noticeably more spritely afterward, particularly program loads.
• The menu talks about a C:\Windows\Prefetch\layout.ini file to control file layout, but does not document it. The O&O tech people told me it only works in  XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64. If you enable the layout.ini option, the files used by Windows mentioned in layout.ini will be placed near the beginning of the hard disk, in the order specified, to load them faster. The layout.ini file uses UTF-16 encoding. It is a Windows feature for all defraggers, not just O & O. It is just a list of files and directories in the optimal order for bootup.
• It is adequately fast for a 40 gig hard disk but is too slow for a 250 gig. It is a little too fussy, often going to a great deal of work for a very marginal improvement. I use a series of ever finer defrags, so that if I stop early, I still get some improvement.
• The shaded colours used in the cluster display are all subtle variations on blue, and on top of that appear to be blended for blocks that have a mixture of types inside them. You can’t tell much. Turn off shading to give a clearer viewer. Even then the default colour scheme uses three very similar shades of blue. You can configure a more distinctive colour scheme by double clicking on the colour swatch in the legend. If there is no legend, you can turn it back on again under the View tab.
• It used to consolidate directory entries together. Now it does not. I wrote a utility called touchdirs part of the FileTimes package, to encourage it, that stamps all directories with the current time as the last access date. If you use COMPLETE/ACCESS this tends to clump all directory entries together. You must use this in conjunction with fsutil to ensure Vista/W7-32/W7-64 manages file access timestamps. This technique does not work well on the C: drive since Windows won’t give access to its directories to TouchDirs.
• It does not completely defrag the disk in a single run. See the features matrix below for files it never defrags. It takes many passes, alternating SPACE and ACCESS/COMPLETE and boot STEALTH defrag to get all the files defragged and the space consolidated. This make little practical difference to performance, but is annoying for someone like myself who also uses a defragger for compulsive aesthetic reasons. It may just be that files in use during the defrag bedevil it, but it seems more than that. If, for example, during an ACCESS/COMPLETE run, a there is a locked file in the middle of the slot where a large file would naturally go, it put the file after the locked file, leaving a large space prior to the locked file. It orders the files strictly in last-access order. It seems to me it should fill the hole with small files that would naturally be placed nearby.
• Defrag only works on W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64. It requires  W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64 However that is still a wider range than most of its competition.
• When using COMPLETE-Access mode, it works on the oldest files first, so if you abort the defrag, you don’t get any improvement. This is analogous to someone who starts his daily housecleaning by cleaning the attic.
• It is often hard to tell just where it is working on disk. If often appears to be hung when it is moving many small files. There is nothing flickering in the cluster display.
• Does not defrag metadata (NTFS alternate file forks), UsnJrnl or $bitmap.
• It will not defrag the page file unless there is a contiguous free space hole big enough to hold it.
• It does not defrag the MFT. It does not internally tidy or resize the registry, the MFT, the directory etc.
• When I tried to defrag a FAT32 C: partition in Win2K, it kept rebooting. It could however defrag a FAT32 D: partition in Win2K.
• It sometimes turns the machine off, suddenly, with no error message. I was able to correct the problem by running chkdsk (with automatically fix errors checked) on all drives. The problem turned out to be corrupted security descriptors.
• When running, the ribbon Start button is disabled, and when stopped the ribbon stop button is disabled. However, the same button is used for both pause and resume. There is no paused indicator on the ribbon. The screen looks the same whether it is running or paused. The pause button should turn into a resume button when it is paused.
• Version 11.0+ has a hibernate mode. However, it is a toggle and there is on indicator to tell you the current state. Further, running commands like Launch don’t automatically bring it out of hibernation. It just fails without telling you why.
• It considers even the old system volume information snapshots (shadow copies) to be exclusively locked. The help files report the bug in Vista that explains why these files cannot be safely defragged. In theory, they could be defragged at boot time. From a performance point of view, this is not a major problem since you rarely use these files.
• It stores the configuration in a binary file: C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\O&O\O&O Defrag\ocx\ocxdata.bin. This does not appear to include the zone configuration, but I can’t find where it is squirreled away. I looked in every file and in the registry. It might in encrypted or compressed form. This is information is more important than you might think. O&O discards all your settings on every reinstall.
• With background defrag, a file mysteriously disappeared. I can’t be sure background defrag was the culprit, but I have ever since I have since turned it off.
• There are three parts to the defrag that work semi-autonomously.
  1. The defrag engine that actually moves files around. It has no user interface.
  2. The GUI that displays how the defrag is going.
  3. The command line interface that names the files as they are moved.
  4. The system tray.
  Each of these four pieces can crash leaving the others running. Much of the problem comes from about 30 seconds lag in the communication or lost messages. You can tell the GUI to display a cell, but the communication delay to the engine and back means it might not respond for 60 seconds, if ever. What they need to do to fix it is provide two communication channels — one for routine traffic and one high priority channel for user commands.
• When you install, you are best to first, shut down O & O Defrag program, shut down the O & O command line program, shut down the service O & O Defrag with the administrative tools, close the the tray icon process with the task manager, uninstall the old version, reboot, close the tray icon process with the task manager again, delete C:\users\ userid\appdata\local\O&O install the new version and reboot, to make sure you don’t have any problems with the old background engine running.
• If you ever tested version 11.1 and decided not to upgrade or buy, you may not test version 11.5. Reverting to a previous version after a test can be problematic too. Tech support will give you special OODRM2.exe software to clear things out.
• If you ever tested version 11.1 and decided not to upgrade or buy, You will need a special temporary evaluation key to test version 11.5.
• It goes into an endless loop if you edit files in the background while it is working. It needs exclusive use of the machine despite the documentation.
• It sometimes crashes if you use the feature to display details about a cluster.
• I have written them dozens of times about bugs and suggestions for improvement. The usual response is a request for more information, as if I had written them something cryptic in Chinese. I get the distinct impression they are just putting me off. They have never fixed a bug I reported or implemented an improvement no matter how much information I provided them. Part of it may be a language problem. I don’t think many people who work there are very fluent in English.
• I refused to buy the latest upgrade because it did not address any of the problems I had written them repeatedly about. Further the things they did change were unimportant.

My comments may sound like utter damnation, but I still consider O&O best of breed, though I if I get some time I will exhaustively retest all the competition to see if I can do better.

• It does boot time, background and scheduled defrags.
• It use an intelligent quick move algorithm that seems to avoid moving and removing the same clusters, unlike the competition that use mindless brute-force strategies.
• The user interface is fairly intuitive and straight forward.
• The GUI looks just as good as any of the commercial competition.
• It has a clever feature of allowing boot time defrags no more than once a day or once every two days.
• You can run a defrag only, fast optimise or full optimise depending on how much time you are willing to invest.

• There is no command line interface.
• It is extremely slow at analysing disks. This is odd given how quick it is at defragging them. Perhaps it uses some inept sort like an insertion sort or linear search.
• The cluster display is confusing. It gives the impression the disk is empty and clusters are added one at a time, rather than already there and shifted around.
• There is no cluster query function to find out what is being stored in each cluster. This makes it hard to figure out what it is thinking.
• It uses two bands, rather than the traditional three, frequently-used and infrequently-used. It correctly puts most of the frequently used files in the outer prime real estate, but it oddly puts some of them in the centre. I am not sure why. There is no documentation on its strategy on the rationale for it.
• Even when you do a full defrag, there are still plenty of fragmented files and large blocks of files out of place when it is finished. It brags it is very quick, but that is like bragging you are quicker at cleaning dishes than anyone else, and you leave some in the sink.
• It does not internally tidy either the registry or the MFT.

• Particularly good at speeding up read access to files.
• Fast since it does not use the klunky official defrag interface.
• It can defrag the MFT, pagefile, dirs etc. without a reboot. It places frequently accessed file near the start of the partition.
• Moves small files into the MFT which gives them faster access and ensures they take up less space. (The downside is the MFT needs more frequent defragging.) It is very simple to run.
• Puts frequently/infrequently accessed/modified files in separate bands.
• Places the MFT, then the pagefile, then the directories, then the high access files. Norton’s placement makes more sense to me.
• The rainbow hued analysis map changes in ways that make sense. Other defraggers seem to have no method to their actions. They appear to just as often be messing up the disk as defragging it.
• It requires only one session to fully defrag the disk.

• There are no options to configure other than the names of files you want put near the beginning or end of the disk.
• It has the disturbing quality of redefining how much of each kind of file it has as it progresses.
• Cannot defrag the first 16 clusters of the MFT.
• It is quite slow when it defrags small files.
• Microsoft claims Symantec’s online defrag of the MFT is dangerous. This could just be Microsoft getting huffy over Symantec bypassing its official klutzy defrag interface, or it could represent a true problem. If Microsoft implemented it properly, there would be no need for bypassing it.
• The defragger is noisier than most, sounding as if it is going to shake your disk to death.
• Two different sets of utilities all on one CD, a  W95/W98/Me and NT/W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64 set. For windows, make sure you manually configure a swap file with Control Panel ⇒ System ⇒ Performance ⇒ Virtual Memory, otherwise SpeedDisk will keep restarting, fearing writes to the temporary swap file. It moves the swap file and directories. However under NT/W2K/XP/W2003/Vista/W7-32/W7-64 it does not move directory entries (on FAT partitions) and metadata files (on NTFS partitions). It leaves them where they are, calling them unmovable files, scattered across the drive. To defrag them, you would have to reformat the drive and reload the files, creating all the directory entries first.