The latest version of Diskeeper features a slew of innovative features that will transparently optimize your hard disk. For example, the program will sit in the background and automatically and in real-time defrag your hard disk. According to the company, it “handles performance-robbing fragmentation as it occurs”. It also includes a bunch of other goodies like InviTasking Technology, I-FAAST 2.0, Frag Shield 2.0, and some core defrag engine enhancements. There’s even an option for Boot-Time Defragmentation, for defragging files that couldn’t be moved while Windows was in use. All of these work together to improve the performance of your hard drive.

For my real world tests I installed Diskeeper 2008 on two machines. The first machine was a Vista box, tricked out to be a media center and a gaming machine. After installing and uninstalling a number of applications on the Vista box, I noticed some serious performance issues and even the occasional frozen screen which required me to force the machine to shutdown. I also noticed that sometimes it appeared as if some directories were missing. Needless to say, I was rooting for Diskeeper.

I installed Diskeeper 2008 and clicked the Defragment button. It immediately popped up a box that showed how fragmented the drive was. When the program completed and said that the drive had been “Defragmented” I shut down the machine and rebooted. I immediately noticed a significant improvement in boot-up time and haven’t had a problem since. The nicest thing about Diskeeper is that I really don’t have to think about the fragmentation of my hard drive again since it will run in the background and automatically defrag the drive as necessary.

For my second real world test of Diskeeper 2008, I installed in on the Windows XP partition of my MacBook. Again, the install took no time at all and the defragmentation took less than five minutes. I wasn’t experiencing any performance issues before but I had some pretty large files that I deleted recently, so it’s good to know that at least the drive is being cared for while I work from now on. I should also mention that pretty much anything can be customized, so if you have specific files that you want left alone, that’s a click away.

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