Why I Uninstalled Diskeeper

Remember Norton Speed Disk Version 3? The one that defragmented DOS drives, long before MS-DOS had DEFRAG? I used to swear by it. Later I added DEFRAG to my AUTOEXEC.BAT file to keep my hard drive tidy, because it was included with DOS.
But Norton Speed Disk became bloatware, and took a long time, so I ditched it and just used Defrag in Windows. I'm not sure if you can even buy Speed Disk any more. When I bought my first Windows XP machine, I tried the built-in Defrag program, and then checked out Diskeeper Lite, but it's no longer listed on the Diskeeper site. Eventually I took the plunge and got Diskeeper version 9. We also installed the server version, despite its hefty price tag.
Recently I got dissatisfied with Diskeeper, because I have a 1.1GB file used by Microsoft SQL Server that it simply refuses to defragment. Sure, there is "only" 6GB available disk space on my drive, but that should be enough. I even went to the trouble of writing Disk Filler to manipulate the "Reserved System Space" to get it to defragment my files, but sometimes even that doesn't work. So a quick Google search took me to a page listing Free Defragmentation Utilities. I immediately downloaded and tried out Mark Russinovich's Contig program. It has now been added to several of my Zippy batch files, to keep Microsoft Access files contiguous. But it seems to follow the same rule about using Reserved System Space, so it doesn't always defragment every file. Still, it's free and quick. Pity it doesn't work on Windows 98.
Now I'm trying two programs from www.dirms.com, which promise "on-the-fly" defragmentation, as well as the ability to remove those small empty gaps between files that Defrag and Diskeeper miss. The down side is that the compacting process takes a long time. Still, I don't mind getting rid of 6800 useless spaces on my hard drive, as well as another 2900 bigger gaps in my drive. Watch this space: it only costs US$10, or you can re-register it every 30 days.

See also: Contig Saves the Day | PerfectDisk to the Rescue | The Great Defrag Shootout: Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV | XV | XVI | XVII | all | why | Benchmarks: DK2008 and DK2007