Installation is quick and painless, and while the main interface window harkens back to the days of Windows 3.1, it is intuitive and effective. Users who haven't been keeping up with their hard drive maintenance will find the initial defrag slow going, but the option to run it in the background will keep them happy. There is a slight slowdown in performance while Diskeeper is running, but it's rarely noticeable. The operation is surprisingly speedy and yields substantially improved performance, especially for large databases, multimedia, and other disk-space gobblers. Other features, like boot-time defragmentation of important files, are equally easy to use and deliver equally impressive results.

Computer users who know they need to keep their hard drives sleek but don't want to spend a lot of time doing it will find Diskeeper a blessing. --Rob Lightner

Amazon.com Product Description
Diskeeper is an automatic disk defragmenter that configures your defragmentation schedule based on the condition of your disk. It eliminates the need for you to know how often to defragment each of your disk volumes for maximum performance. Diskeeper will take note of fragmentation levels and adjust run-time frequency anywhere from every hour to one week. Diskeeper 7.0 is up to six times faster than earlier versions. It takes minimal system resources to maintain peak performance and runs in the background, unnoticed by end users.

I made sure our IT guys at work put it on all our systems. Now we don't have to wait around for our systems - and I can get more done in less time.


Too much for too little   September 8, 2003
 0 out of 4 found this review helpful

$45 for a utility that does the same thing as the built-in WinXP defragmenter? I don't think so. The only real advantage this has over WinXPs defragmenter (which happens to be the "lite" version of Diskeeper) is that it can defragment the Windows paging file--and that can make a real performance difference, so here's what you do.

Download the 30-day trial version. Set your paging file to a fixed size (set the minimum and max to the recommended max size, or a little more). Install and run the trial version to defragment the paging file. Done. Let the trial expire, and use the built-in Windows defragmenter from now on.


Buyer Beware   April 13, 2003
 3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Diskeeper may indeed be the best defrag utility ever, but it does have some highly frustrating attributes. Almost all of the automated features it has result in the computer being "taken over" by Diskeeper at the most inopportune times. Nothing like playing a game when suddenly Diskeeper decides its going to defrag the drive and zap almost 100% of the system resources for an undetermined period of time.

It works OK when defragging manually, but stear clear of any of its automatic or scheduled features!


Great software!   February 12, 2003
 5 out of 5 found this review helpful

Diskeeper performs as promised though it is not consolidating the directories (at least visually). I have not had any problems with speed during the "Set It And Forget It" as long as the priority is set to low or lowest. I have not had any problems with inconsistent disk messages either. That might be due to physical problems with the disk. Windows does not deal with hardware problems real well sometimes.
As for the "built-in" defragmenter, it is a scaled back version of Diskeeper. Diskeeper was developed by a guy that worked on the original development of NTFS for Windows. Speedisk is an O.K. product but I'd use Diskeeper anyday.


Simply the best.   January 11, 2003
 9 out of 9 found this review helpful

I've been a user of Norton Utility Speedisk longer than some of you have been alive. I manage the IT department of a company that has laptop users that can't be away from their computers long enough for me to defrag them, so I thought I'd try Diskeeper because it defrags in the background.

Yes, the initial manual defragmentation is slower than Norton...BUT, it defragmented the drive on my laptop to 0.1% fragmentation, while Norton Speedisk never got below around 3%. Add to that the fact that I didn't have to exit out of any processes running in the background.

After doing the initial defragmentation, I set the Diskeeper to "Set it and forget it" and it works in the background. I don't notice any performance loss (running on Windows XP Pro). I'm using an eval copy (available from the company's web site) but I've ordered a 5-pack for my users.