Winternals Defrag Manager 4.0 is no longer sold,
as Winternals was bought by
Microsoft because they needed the founders to work on
Vista, or something. I took my laptop round to a friend's office, where they are still using the program, in order to try it out. It was written by the guys who wrote
Contig, so I was expecting some pretty nifty software.
This program is clearly designed to address the problem of keeping all the PCs and servers on a network defragmented and organised. It has a minimalist approach to the task, so if you're looking for a program that shows you what it is doing while you watch, you're out of luck.
You set up a defrag schedule and identify all of the computers on the network that should run the schedule. The results can be seen in the "history" section. See image above. There is an option to consolidate disk space, run chkdsk, and perform a standard defrag. Fortunately it uses the same kind of library as
Contig uses, rather than
WDD, so it won't fall over when disk space gets limited. There is also a boot-time defrag option.
There is also an "advanced mode" option, where you can create a Windows boot CD (similar to
Paragon Total Defrag) and then run a defrag in "offline" mode. I found that this option got stuck at 49% on my C: drive, and then did nothing, as shown in the photograph of the screen shown here.
I guess I'm a bit disappointed that the defragmentation strategy isn't as advanced as
PerfectDisk or
O&O Defrag, considering this was a commercial package from a well-respected source. I have not had enough time to put this program through all the usual tests, but it is a bit disappointing. Perhaps
Microsoft could get these programmers to rewrite it for another version of
Vista, and get rid of the
Diskeeper derivative they are using at present, which isn't great.
Winternals Defrag Manager 4.0 is no longer sold, as Winternals was bought by Microsoft because they needed the founders to work on Vista, or something. I took my laptop round to a friend's office, where they are still using the program, in order to try it out. It was written by the guys who wrote Contig, so I was expecting some pretty nifty software.
I guess I'm a bit disappointed that the defragmentation strategy isn't as advanced as PerfectDisk or O&O Defrag, considering this was a commercial package from a well-respected source. I have not had enough time to put this program through all the usual tests, but it is a bit disappointing. Perhaps Microsoft could get these programmers to rewrite it for another version of Vista, and get rid of the Diskeeper derivative they are using at present, which isn't great.
1 comment:
The BootCD version of WDM4 can use pagefile.sys space for defragging which is a good unique feature IMHO.
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