Ultimate Defrag

[gman! 1]

I have been using Ultimate Defrag (free version) for a very long time now, and it works wonders for my computer. It is fast, intuitive, and it has many options for defragmenting your hard drive. I highly recommend this program because honestly, it leaves all other programs in the dust, and so does the free version. So far the only differences I've found between the payware and freeware version, is the payware version has a newer user interface and some of the options are in different places, but the both do the same thing and they do it very well.I highly recommend watching this video (Wait... before you go and watch 1 minute out of 9 minutes, think again and watch the whole thing :(), so you can get some background information on how the program works:http://www.youtube.com/comment_servlet?all...v%3DyldQcvcqPMoIf you want to download UD (Ultimate Defrag) Free version, check here:http://download.cnet.com/UltimateDefrag-Fr...4-10582157.htmlUse it correctly, and Windows (XP, Vista, and even 7) will boot faster, games will be smoother (including FSX) and you'll have lots of fun flying FSX in its tip top shape. UD Free also has a scheduler if you like to don't like tweaking all the time.For those interested in the payware version, you can get Ultimate Defrag here:http://www.disktrix.com/ultimatedefrag_buy.htmYour Welcome :(!

[Bob Scott 7,721]

When somebody makes a claim that a program "leaves all the others in the dust," I kinda want to know what sort of objective basis that claim is made on...what kind of head-to-head testing was done, and what the criteria are. Usually I find it's just somebody parroting advertising propaganda.Personally I use O&O defrag, and find it to work well. I know a couple people that had their HDD's scrambled by a misbehaving copy of Ultimate Defrag, which in the end proved anything BUT free to them considering the many hours they had to spend to rebuild Rome.RegardsBob ScottColonel, USAF (ret)ATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VColorado Springs, CO

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

I've used this one and I tried Smart Defrag. I ended up going with Smart Defrag over Ultimate Defrag. The interface was easy and it's free.

[Gavin 99]

To the OP.Why is it that you recommend Ultimate Defrag here, yet on your post: http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtopic=267300&hl= you make the following statement:"Defragment after installing everything. If you use UltimateDefrag, please ditch it, it has many bugs and can end up putting more fragmented files on the disk (I learned my lesson). If you want a good defragmenter below check the links at the bottom of this thread." And then you recommend Smart Defrag.I mean no offence to you but am curious as to why you seem to contradict yourself. It seems that you genuinely want to help people improve their FS experience, but it's hard for me to trust your advice when it seems to be contradictory.

[gman! 1]

To the OP.Why is it that you recommend Ultimate Defrag here, yet on your post: http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?showtopic=267300&hl= you make the following statement:"Defragment after installing everything. If you use UltimateDefrag, please ditch it, it has many bugs and can end up putting more fragmented files on the disk (I learned my lesson). If you want a good defragmenter below check the links at the bottom of this thread." And then you recommend Smart Defrag.I mean no offence to you but am curious as to why you seem to contradict yourself. It seems that you genuinely want to help people improve their FS experience, but it's hard for me to trust your advice when it seems to be contradictory.

I knew someone would say that sooner or later... I was using UltimateDefrag for a few months on Vista and a couple of weeks after switching to Windows 7 in Nov and was not getting good results so I stopped using it after a while and constantly switched between it and smart defrag, because they both have different methods of defragmentation. I recently saw this video I posted and read the UltimateDefrag manual to really understand how the program works, and I have learned a generous amount of information on how to optimize your Hard Disk Drive, and also on how to use the program effectively. Before I was using an Auto Defrag, which does not respect High Performance and Archive options in the program, and I did not notice that. Now, I perform the defragmenting manually with respect to high performance (I set the FSX directory to be on the outer tracks of the HDD, in a contiguous order to reduce seek time and access time, and also to minimize head movement inside the Hard Drive. I honestly did not mean to confuse anyone or contradict myself. You should always review advice with other sources or test yourself. :(BTW: Ultimate Defrag is the only defragmenter that I have seen that moves directories near the MFT of the Hard Disk since the MFT directs the hard disk to the actual directories.

[red1 0]

This forum keeps getting stranger and stranger lately... :( As far as defrag goes...i believe its very hard to make judgments on different software because the end product is very hard to judge. I've seen a few posts with actual hard numbers for o&o showing its superiority while I have not seen actual numbers for others...not saying they aren't out there though.

[gman! 1]

Well wudda know! I found a review of the 2008 payware version on AVSIM.Here it is: http://www.avsim.com/pages/0608/DiskTrix/defrag.htm

[Gavin 99]

I knew someone would say that sooner or later... I was using UltimateDefrag for a few months on Vista and a couple of weeks after switching to Windows 7 in Nov and was not getting good results so I stopped using it after a while and constantly switched between it and smart defrag, because they both have different methods of defragmentation. I recently saw this video I posted and read the UltimateDefrag manual to really understand how the program works, and I have learned a generous amount of information on how to optimize your Hard Disk Drive, and also on how to use the program effectively. Before I was using an Auto Defrag, which does not respect High Performance and Archive options in the program, and I did not notice that. Now, I perform the defragmenting manually with respect to high performance (I set the FSX directory to be on the outer tracks of the HDD, in a contiguous order to reduce seek time and access time, and also to minimize head movement inside the Hard Drive. I honestly did not mean to confuse anyone or contradict myself. You should always review advice with other sources or test yourself. :(BTW: Ultimate Defrag is the only defragmenter that I have seen that moves directories near the MFT of the Hard Disk since the MFT directs the hard disk to the actual directories.

Thanks for the reply.

[nudata 10]

Thanks for the reply.

Don't all these programs use the same built-in defrag functions that are part of Windows? The differences are how they dress up the info and options.Ultimate DeFrag will not start on my Windows7 Home system. Ran ok under XP. Vendor can't fix. Now use built-in defrag.

[frankla 44]

Don't all these programs use the same built-in defrag functions that are part of Windows? The differences are how they dress up the info and options.Ultimate DeFrag will not start on my Windows7 Home system. Ran ok under XP. Vendor can't fix. Now use built-in defrag.

Update your Ultimate defrag or reinstall it. It will work on Windows7

[gman! 1]

Don't all these programs use the same built-in defrag functions that are part of Windows? The differences are how they dress up the info and options.Ultimate DeFrag will not start on my Windows7 Home system. Ran ok under XP. Vendor can't fix. Now use built-in defrag.

The don't use the same methods of defragmentation. The have to use specifications created by Microsoft so files on the hard drive are defragmented correctly and no files are corrupted or destroyed.BTW: If you want you can use the default defragger, but it is horrible in my honest opinion.

[Geofa 108]

The don't use the same methods of defragmentation. The have to use specifications created by Microsoft so files on the hard drive are defragmented correctly and no files are corrupted or destroyed.BTW: If you want you can use the default defragger, but it is horrible in my honest opinion.

When I had Vista I used Ultimate Defragger. It crashed often in the middle of a defrag. There were several updates, but I still often had crashes. Shortly after the crashes my Vista never ran correctly-and I had two years of troubles that even 3 series of Microsoft techs could not solve. Now, I am not going to blame my troubles there for sure-but at this point I am going the conservative route with Windows 7 and using the built in defragger only.

[Guest UlfB]

When somebody makes a claim that a program "leaves all the others in the dust," I kinda want to know what sort of objective basis that claim is made on...what kind of head-to-head testing was done, and what the criteria are. Usually I find it's just somebody parroting advertising propaganda....

AgreeI've been using O&O Defrag for a year and it works OK.

[Cruachan 705]

When somebody makes a claim that a program "leaves all the others in the dust," I kinda want to know what sort of objective basis that claim is made on.

Same thought occurred to me.Anyway, I've been using PerfectDisk for 4 years since version 7 (now version 10) and it has never once thrown me a curve.Tried O&O but it screwed the o/s on my C: partition - something to do with incompatibility with the HAL caused by me using an earlier release of XP Home (32bit) SP2 at the time. I survived because I had a recent backup of my installation. This does beg the question why the developers of O&O apparently missed/overlooked that one?I'm still on XP (never needed to reinstall, no pressing need to 'upgrade'), fully updated to SP3, and PerfectDisk continues to carry out its tasks perfectly and without any fuss. As far as I am concerned, efficient reliable computing is all about using stable software (and hardware) that can be trusted to never (or at least rarely) let you down. Who needs the hassle, certainly not me. My days of fighting with the box of tricks to make it work are, for the time being, over... thankfully.I cannot imagine why anyone would feel they must choose a defragmenter that can do a NAME defrag on a hard drive other than on one dedicated to flight simming with countless thousands of those texture files to access and load. For anything else I very much doubt whether the choice of defragmenter would make a perceptible difference.I'm one of those that Michael Greenblatt of FSG would have issues with. For housekeeping convenience I have XP plus the important utilities installed on a 20GB partition and all the rest (approx. 220GB), including highly customized FS9 and, to a lesser extent, FSX, is on D: the second partition of my 500GB primary physical drive. My pagefile is on E: my second 500GB physical drive. This is used mainly for archiving, but I do store large repositories of flight sim related texture files on this drive to avoid taking up space needlessly on D:. My box of tricks does just about everything I need it to do. PerfectDisk 10 keeps things sweet and Acronis True Image Home 11 takes care of the backups.MikeASRock 939Dual-SATA2 (AM2CPU Board), AMD Athlon 64X2 6400+ (BE,3200MHz,Windsor), Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro, 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC2-6400 4-4-4-12(2T) (Dual Channel), NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB (DDR3) (Forceware 195.62 WHQL), SB Audigy2 ZS Platinum (Drivers version 6.00.0001.1371), Antec NeoHE 650W PSU, Windows XP Home Edition (SP3), DirectX 9.0c

[gman! 1]

The problem with Perfect Disk, is even its payware version doesn't have as many methods as defragmenting as the free version of UltimateDefrag (The free version is actually a beta version of UltimateDefrag before they released UltimateDerag 2008). UltimateDefrag gives you an option to put files of your choice towards the outer tracks of the hard drive (High Performance Option), which is the fastest part, and put the files that don't need major performance (Music, Videos, Archive files such as ZIP, 7z, RAR, etc) towards the inner most tracks of the drive. While doing all this if you select a File/Folder name defragment it will sort them in alphabetical order, which can significantly reduce seek times (the amount of time it takes for the head to move), since all the files will be in sequential order and the head will probably not even have as much since the rotation of the hard drive will make it read some areas without any head movement at all. This improves performance for files that will be placed on the outer AND inner tracks because they are organized and will cause less work for the HDD.

When I had Vista I used Ultimate Defragger. It crashed often in the middle of a defrag. There were several updates, but I still often had crashes. Shortly after the crashes my Vista never ran correctly-and I had two years of troubles that even 3 series of Microsoft techs could not solve. Now, I am not going to blame my troubles there for sure-but at this point I am going the conservative route with Windows 7 and using the built in defragger only.

Sorry to hear that. I too partiatly messed up my HDD on Vista because I wasn't using it correctly and setting the optimal options, but now I know. One thing about the program is its not made for users that are looking for help or ease of use. Most users will probably have to read the manual or read/watch guides online, before they truly understand how it works. The program gives the user control almost full control of his or her hard drive meaning that they can basically speed up or reduce performance depending on how they use it The default defragmenter in Windows is a fine choice though and it was made by Microsoft as a "set and forget" program. It still gets the job done although so it is not a bad choice. :(I'll post some images of how de-fragmented my FSX hard drive is, and this is using Ultimate Defrag only.