Sunday, January 11, 2009

Puran Defrag 6 released

Puran Software recently sent me information on version 6 of their excellent Puran Defrag product.
New features include:
  • Multiple schedules are possible now.
  • Added Idle Time Defragmentation.
  • Added Screensaver Defragmentation.
Minor changes include:
  • Percentage display when moving large files.
  • Manual addition of file exclusion expression is now possible from main GUI.
  • Removable storage can be accessed from main GUI.
  • Changed registration system. Now with one permanent registration key for each user.
  • Puran Defrag now remembers its window position.
I have also had the opportunity to test the beta version of the product, and it has some nice improvements and finishing touches that existing customers will appreciate. I am still amazed at the quality of the software, as well as the simplicity of the interface. The current version is on sale for US$19.95, and the upgrade will be free for existing customers. You can expect a review as soon as I figure out how to benchmark the defrag products being reviewed.
Update Mon 12 Jan: The product has been released and registered users have been sent their new registration keys. More to follow

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

I really like Puran Defrag but has anyone else noticed that version 6 is a lot slower to start up than previous versions.

Donn Edwards said...

I really haven't noticed, but I will run a few tests. Thanks for the question.

Are you using WinXP or Vista? The setup file is only marginally larger that version 5.1

Anonymous said...

Thanks Donn. I am using XP SP3 Home. For me the difference in start up was very noticeable. 5.1 starts up virtually instantaneously while 6 takes several seconds and so I have gone back to 5.1 for now. I have an extremely fast computer. BTW, thanks for your blog.

Donn Edwards said...

Weird. On Vista, PnD 5.1 loads on my wife's laptop under a count of 5, i.e. within 3 seconds. It's too quick to use a stopwatch accurately.

On my laptop, running Vista, PnD 6.0 loads even faster, probably a count of 3. Again, it's too difficult to time acurately.

In both cases I tried this after allowing PnD to do a full boot time defrag, and then I rebooted again.

I will do formal tests soon. This was just a quick experiement.

Anonymous said...

I've not noticed any difference between the startup time of Puran Defrag 5.1 and 6.

Donn as you also use PerfectDisk as well one point to watch out for is that the placement of the MFT Zone using Puran is totally different to the placement that the most recent versions of PerfectDisk use.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for checking the start up times for me. Either it is XP specific or I had a bad install. When I have some time I will try 6 again. Thanks!

Anonymous said...

I don't think it can be XP specific as I tried it out on XP Home SP3 and as I posted up the thread a bit I saw no difference whatsoever in startup time.
Could be your AV is reacting differently to this version and giving it a more thorough scan which creates a slowdown.

Anonymous said...

I tried installing version 6 again and this time I timed the load times. 5.1 is just over 1 sec, maybe 1.2 seconds. 6.0 is 7 seconds. It will be interesting to see what others with XP find. Thanks.

Donn Edwards said...

I'd be interested to see the response once you have run a full boot time defrag with all the optimizations switched on. Does the time go down or not?

How mny drives does your system have? What type. I'm curious.

Anonymous said...

I didn't do a boot time defrag after installing 6 but I had recently done one (all optimizations on) with 5.1 and after installing 6, I analysed the drive and fragmentation was 0%. Do you think doing a boot time defrag immediately after installing 6 would make that much of a difference?

I have 2 hard drives. The C drive is a Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB, 10,000 RPM and my backup drive is a Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000, 7200 RPM. I have 4GB of RAM and a Q9650 CPU over clocked to 4.05 GHz. Thanks.

Anonymous said...

Does anyone know if this version of puran defrag 6.0 supports Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) for vista?

Thanks in advance

Rob

Donn Edwards said...

From the PnD 6 help file in the VSS section:
>>>
It is highly recommended that you format your drive with cluster size of 16K if you want to defrag it and also do not want to lose Shadow Copies.

If above is not possible for you then to configure Puran Defrag so that data movement is minimum and shadow copies are not lost or the loss is minimum, uncheck Additional Operations including Fill Gaps, Optimize Drectories, Free Space and PIOZR.
<<<
There is also a graphic showing what to do.