Friday, April 27, 2007

The Great Defrag Shootout II: Ashampoo Magical Defrag 2.08


The first "on-the-fly" defrag program I tried was Buzzsaw, which isn't bad, albeit a bit quirky. The only problem was that I couldn't run my grid.org calculation program without convincing Buzzsaw that the PC was busy.
So when I saw a reference to the "Magical Defrag 2.0" program from Ashampoo, I decided to give it a try. It failed. The link between the front-end interface and the back-end defragmentation service is flaky at best, so it would carry on doing things even when other programs were busy. Also, I don't recall any option of being able to load the front-end at startup, other than by copying the icon into the startup folder on my start menu.
Once the damn thing started running it slowed everything else down, to the point where the responsiveness of the PC varied between sluggish and rubbery. Even the Google screen saver took strain. I decided to overlook this and give the program a chance. I left it running overnight and in the morning it assured me that everything was fine and defragmented.
After doing some work on SQL I waited to see what would happen. Nothing. Even though the file was now defragmented Magical Defrag 2.08 ignored this. When I copied some documents it seemed to kick in and make sure everything was properly defragmented.
Later I noticed that my machine had almost stopped. Further investigation revealed that the defrag progam and eMule were both trying to access a file at the same time, and that the defrag program had locked eMule's open files. Not good. I can't use a program that tries to take over my machine and slows it down. After all, defragmentation is supposed to improve PC performance, not make it worse.
Now that this software has been uninstalled and my PC is behaving again, it's on to Vopt 8.18

The Great Defrag Shootout: Part I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV | XV | XVI | XVII | XVIII | XIX | XX | XXI | XXII | XXIII | XXIV | XXV | XXVI | XXVII | XXVIII | XXIX| winner | all | why

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been using Magical Defrag 1.11 for about 1 year and did not encounter any of the problems mentioned in the write up. In fact I am wondering why the computer world hasn't discovered Magical Defrag, five of my friends have installed this program and all are happy. I am running 2.2 Ghz with 1 gigabyte ram on XP SP-2.

ragbaby50














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Anonymous said...

I down loaded A,shampoo magical Security but didn't like it as it tool over my PC. Now I can't get rid of it, some of it I have been able to delete it but it as left some dill files and icons references all over the place.
If you have any ideas can you post them

Donn Edwards said...

My first try would be CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com). Did you contact their technical support?

STG said...

I've used version 1 as well and it was much better behaved, although not great. Version 2 has major problems and tends to look up by itself...

Anonymous said...

Have had difficulties removing a few programs lately, tried Eraser, and it is good, but Unlocker Assistant creamed the ones that survived Eraser...FWIW.
Bob128

Donn Edwards said...

Interesting product. I'll check it out!

http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/