Just thought I’d give a heads up on a couple of hard drive utilities I’ve found to be very useful:
- Clean Disk Security for thorough hard drive cleaning (I’ve used with XP Pro but not sure if will work with Vista)
- Diskeeper for disk defragmentation
Clean Disk Security has a number of cleaning features, but one of the things I most like about it is that it gets rid of the slack space in between files. It also clears out file names from the master file allocation table for files that have been deleted. In case you didn’t already know, files that you delete normally from your hard drive are not fully deleted. Residue remains (generally the entire file) and the names of deleted files can remain with the allocation table. Over time, this really adds up to a lot of lost space. So, it’s a good idea to run a utility like CDS every couple of months or so, depending on your level of use.
You are probably aware that file defragmentation can improve the performance of your hard drive. If you use the regular utility that comes with Windows, you will see good performance improvement from it. However, a utility such as Diskeeper in my view does a better job of defragmenting and has some options that are not available in the built-in utility. For one, it allows for background defrag, so that you don’t have to worry about running it: it runs automatically for you, and you will not see a performance hit from it running in the background (at least I haven’t). It also allows for boot defragmentation, which can move folders up front and defrag the file allocation table and a few other things. I especially like to run this mode right after using CDS.