Is Defragging On a Budget Possible?

On a Windows machine, a big part of life is hard drive defragging – the process of stacking all of the blocks together to make for quicker access. According to the Workers’ Edge blog at Cnet, defragging can also increase the life of your hard drive. The theory sounds reasonable to me. The less your drive needle has to move, the longer it should last.

Finding a good defragging application can be a tough task though, if you don’t want to spend any money. My personal favorite for years has been Diskeeper. It’s feature-robust, and can defrag whenever the PC is idle, or run at a specified time each night in order to make sure your computer is always defragged whenever you set foot on it. The smallest version available is $30, which I consider to be a great value. But, it’s not free.

The same blog as mentioned above wholeheartedly recommends Auslogics Disk Defrag, which is a completely free solution and improves vastly on the built-in Windows defrag application. I don’t think that goal would be too difficult to accomplish, considering Windows defrag application is lackluster in all regards. Auslogics is well worth a look if you are wanting to defrag on a budget.

I wish I could say that I’m guaranteed to recoup many times over the time I spent defragging my PCs by having them run so much faster post-defrag. Maybe I’m kidding myself that there’s any practical benefit to defragging, but then again, maybe my dog wouldn’t smell any worse without a bath.

Source: Workers’ Edge Blog