Condusiv has recently released the next version of Diskeeper, 12. I’ve been running it for a while now and I’m still satisfied with the way it optimizes my drives without eating up the resources. Traditionally I wipe my machine on a yearly basis because of all the extra stuff that gets installed and the slow down on the hard drives but since I’ve been using Diskeeper I’m averaging closer to 18 months now. The hard drive just isn’t running slow.
For those of you using SSDs then the new version may be very useful as it has optimizations for SSDs. As you probably know SSDs shouldn’t be defragged like regular drives because it’ll reduce the life expectancy. Diskeeper somehow is suppose to keep them running at top speed without reducing the lifetime. I have no idea how it works or how well because I don’t use SSD myself but as SSD becomes more common this kind of technology is going to be really useful.
Another area that has been improved is with the initial writes to the drives. Prevention is better than curing fragmentation. Diskeeper is suppose to prevent common fragmentation problems from occurring to begin with. This means you don’t have to waste resources on the defrag process. Unfortunately this isn’t easy to measure so I just have to take their word for it.
HyperBoost is also new to this release. It is documented as speeding up boot times without impacting the system. For an initial install Windows generally boots really fast but as more components are added over time it slows down considerably. This is one of my key indicators to know when to clean the machine. But for my current machine I haven’t really noticed Windows slow down at all. Therefore I can’t really say whether HyperBoost is helping me at all or not because it certainly hasn’t slowed things down. Still, slow boots are common on Windows machines so anything that can help alleviate that is desired.
One area that was heavily modified is the UI. I can’t really say that I like the new UI. It seems “prettier” but wasteful to me. The old interface wasn’t pretty but I could quickly see everything I needed. True techno-geek stuff. The new UI seems like it is designed so a non-techy person could use it. I have to scroll to see information now which makes it harder to navigate and not everything is visible to me at once. Defrag is not something non-techies would do so I don’t understand the need for dumbing up the UI. Maybe I’ll get use to it over time but one of the things I’ve always liked about Diskeeper is the “set and forget” approach so I don’t expect to have to use the UI very often. This isn’t really a show stopper though.
So if you haven’t been defragging your drives, are using Window’s poor man’s defrag or just need to get a new version then Diskeeper 12 is a good product to check out. It isn’t that expensive, does its job without having to be tweaked with and will keep your system running well.