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Reviews For Auslogics Disk Defrag version 1.4.12
Average Rating: 4 Based On 2 Reviews
Date: March 13, 2008, 11:13:55am
user: gepley
computer: Intel Celeron D, 3.33GHZ, 2 GB RAM & AMD Turion 64 Mobile, 1.58GHZ, 1 GB RAM
operating system: Windows XP Media Center & XP Pro, SP2 and SP3
screen reader: JAWS 9
rating: 4
comments: Auslogics Disk Defrag is a disk defragmentation program, like Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter tool... Start menu, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter... only it's a great deal faster than Microsoft's tool.
It's also free, so the price is right!
Disk defragmentation occurs on your computer over time, as you add and delete files. Bits and pieces of your files can become spread over various parts of your computer's hard drive, so the disk drive head has to move about over various areas of the drive to access the file, which can produce a noticeable loss in speed of your computer. Disk defragmentation programs, like Auslogics Disk Defrag, take the defragmented files and write them back on the drive as the single files they originally were, so the drive head can access the file later in a single place.
For years, you've either had to tolerate the extremely slow performance of Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter tool, or you've had to go buy software to do the job faster. Auslogics Disk Defrag is finally a free solution that works, and works well, even with screen readers, and, as it's free, you can't beat the price.
When you run the program, you're presented with a friendly wizard-type screen that lists your various drives, along with "Next", "Help" and "Close" buttons.
If you use a software speech synthesizer for JAWS, other than Eloquence, you might also want to use the Ctrl+JAWSKey+S to select and change to the Eloquence synthesizer, before continuing. This is just wise with some software, due to what the software must do. Some software speech synthesizers otherwise tend to stutter or break up a lot if other software's doing some intensive operation, as the disk defrag's about to do.
You can't realistically expect utility software, such as DVD or CD burning or ripping, anti-virus or spyware scanning, disk or registry defragmentation, to NOT use a lot of system resources. These programs aren't designed to be used while you're trying to use your computer for other things. In fact, doing so's not a good idea. You should always run programs of this type by getting them started on their task, then leaving your computer alone, only checking status on occasion. Don't check email, do instant messaging, browse the internet, or work on a document or spreadsheet while using most utility program functions like those mentioned above, or you're just asking for trouble.
With this disk defrag, you simply select your drive from the list... it's usually drive C:, and I've found this to be the default... then you can either tab to the "Next" button or press Alt+N for "Next", and the program gets started on defragmenting your drive.
You can tab around to various buttons after this, to pause the process, stop it, get help or close the software. I'm not really sure why there's both a close and a stop. I usually pause, stop or allow the program to do its job. I haven't really run any benchmarks on the software, but in my experience, whereas Microsoft's Disk Defragmenter might take several hours to do the job, Auslogics Disk Defrag tends to take perhaps a half hour to an hour, so you get some idea of how much faster it is.
I've found the software quite stable, and it seems to do the job it's designed to do without causing any strange disk errors or other system problems, which one usually expects to find with some free system utility software of this type.
The only complaint I really have about Auslogics Disk Defrag is the screen that's displayed while the software's doing its job... the screen with the pause, stop, help and close buttons I mentioned. If you want to see the various statistics on what the program's finding on your system as it's doing its job, you'll need to switch to your mouse cursor to read the screen. This is the reason I gave the program a 4 rating instead of a 5, and maybe I'm being a touch picky here, but it would also be possible to have the various stats in a read-only edit window so screen reader users don't need to use the mouse cursor or other means to read the information. Had this feature been there, I'd have given the program a 5 rating.
The software does let you display a report once it's done, which is an HTML file shown in your web browser, which is nice, because this makes the report accessible.
Caution: Auslogics has changed its installer for this program a bit as of this version, apparently because they offer some other programs. I noticed that the installer for this version wants to create an Auslogics program group in your Start menu, with the Disk Defrag group inside that, which is different from previous versions. Therefore, I recommend you uninstall any previous version before installing this one, unless you don't mind clutter in your Start menu.
However, I do highly recommend Auslogics Disk Defrag, for its speed, ease of use and accessibility... it's such a joy to find a system utility tool like this that doesn't require scripts or other screen reader kludges, that's just written right, and does the job for you... and... you can't beat the free price tag!
Date: March 13, 2008, 1:51:34pm
user: marrie
computer: hp pivillion laptop
operating system: windows xpsp2
screen reader: jaws 7.0
rating: 4
comments: I would also give this program a 4. it slowed my system down for a second and it's currently using about 76 percent of my cpu. The installer was fast though and very easy to use. The web site is at http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag
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