Defragmenting your hard drive may not yield the massive performance benefits that it does on older operating systems, but it can certainly help–especially if you have a hard drive stuffed to the brim with photos, videos, and documents. The problem with most defragmentation tools is that they take a long time to clean up your hard drive. But this is not the case with Smart Defrag, a free app that can scan and defragment even large hard drives in a fraction of the time required by other tools.
The tangible benefits of defragmenting your hard drive are hotly debated, and most modern operating systems do a fairly good job of keeping themselves organized without the help of defragmentation applications. Even so, as hard drives get larger and are filled more with files like photos, videos and documents, defragging from time to time can help keep your system running in top shape.
The major benefit that Smart Defrag has over other disk defragmentation applications is that it’s fast. The app scanned my 180GB boot drive in less than 3 minutes–significantly faster than even Windows’ own built-in defrag tool. Best of all, the app doesn’t require that you essentially run it and go to bed. You can run Smart Defrag while your normal applications are open. The app’s effectiveness is decreased the more active you are with your system, but if you want to defrag while surfing the Web or working on a Word document, you won’t notice a significant drop in performance.
Smart Defrag can scan multiple hard drives at the same time, bringing down the overall time required to defragment your system. You can even tell Smart Defrag to defragment your drive at certain times, allowing you to schedule regular defragmentation sessions for times when you know you won’t be using your system.
The simple-to-install app can run quietly in the background, tidying up your system whenever your computer is idle. But if you’re not a fan of applications running in the background, you can run the app on-demand. The developers of Smart Defrag claim that the app also moves your files around your hard drive so your most frequently accessed files are on the fastest physical parts of your drive. Smart Defrag is free and supports Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and reportedly, even the unreleased Windows 7.
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If you take a lot of digital photos, you know that sometimes you need to tweak them to get them “just right”. Whether it’s issues with lighting and color, poorly framed subject, or the dreaded red-eye, you know that you need a tool to help you clean up your images. You also know that if you want to buy a copy of Photoshop you may have to refinance your house.
