Windows Tools, Help & Guides

It is inevitable that your computer becomes slower and slower over time. Even a tuned and high-performance computer will after a while take a long time to start or turn off. Problems with programs hanging or total computer freeze, error codes and slow overall performance at times, is what we all encounter, now and then.

Sometimes the errors are traced back to faulty drivers, or hardware, but usually most of our computer problems is in our clogged registry, fragmented hard-drive and so on. There are many programs out there that promises to solve this, some a free (like the Windows Defragment utility) other cost money.

Personally I don’t like the Windows Defragment Utility, mainly because I don’t find it very user-friendly, it is slow, it hogs up cpu power and it generally doesn’t do a very good job (not on my system anyway).

Advanced Defrag 4.4.2

During the years I have tested many defrag solutions and have very often come up short. But this peace of software really impressed me. Okay it has an odd-looking interface – but when you look into it is actually very intuitive as it resembles your Hard-drive. The software is very straightforward and easy; select your drive, press a button and voilà.

This version of Advance Defrag offers to take care of your registry, hard-drives, External USB devices. It also comes with real-time defragment and scheduling settings.

Interface

The interface shows you a large disk divided into cells which I represent each cluster on the disk. After Analyzing my disk it shows not only how much of the disk that’s fragmented, but also where it’s stored on the disk. An Easy-to-follow color scheme makes it very easy to read and where to direct your attention. If you click on a Cluster you get information about that block and what it contains.

Registry Defrag

When it comes to my registry I am always both careful and suspicious. I don’t trust anyone to mess with it. 9 out of 10 times I have tried a Registry-Fix-Utility I end up running system restore after failing to get my computer back up and running. So it was with a slight nervous excitement I pressed Start Defragment Registry. To my great relief, not only did it find and fix errors, but my computer survived. No trouble what so ever.  Phew.

The software also did it in less than 5 minutes – which I also find very impressive.

Hard-Drive and USB

When you click on Start Defragment you get two options: “Quick” and “InDepth“. The Quick Option runs through your disk de-fragmenting it in a matter of minutes – a really impressive speed. The inDepth-Option is what you do every to or three months to make sure that your system runs on as “little fuel” as possible by rearranging often used files, freeing up more space and improving the overall performance.

They promise that the InDepth-Option  won’t spend more than 20 minutes on any disk you throw at it and to test this I started writing this article as I started de-fragmenting my main Hard-drive. As I reach this paragraph it’s not half way through my 250GB Hard-Drive (56,8 GB used space) – so the total amount of time they claim, is probably measured on an idle computer. I will check the report when it’s done.

Real Time Defrag

Now this is a feature I really like.  Every defrag utility with respect for itself will have an option to run on a scheduled time (so does this one). But the option to run it; Real Time, is something different all together. Real-Time Monitoring is what you expect any decent anti-virus or firewall application to do – but I have not as of yet seen it on a disk management program (I know I might be proven wrong).

Advanced Defrag will actually monitor your files as you store them and when the load on your CPU is low – it will make sure it’s stored in a contiguous space, and thereby maintaining the overall performance.
After Advanced Defrag has analyzed your disk, it presents a detailed report of any problems found and what  you should do to resolve it. In the interest of finding Cons, I do find the report a bit hard to read, if you are not too familiar with this kind of information; it is very detailed and feels a bit daunting. I would love to see Click-able links in the report with links to vocabulary, dictionary and extended information where available. As we are used to find in website blogs and tech-sites.

In Conclusion

I am impressed with Advanced Defrag. It does what it’s supposed to. It does so in a small amount of time with little to no CPU-Load. It feels as if it actually has improved my three year old computer. I shall continue testing the software (especially the real time monitor function) and will update this post with any noticeably differences that might occur.

This is a program you really should try for yourself – and I do believe it to be worth the money.

Download you trial here: Advanced Defrag, 7 day trial

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