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Thread: Free Defrag Program, Good or bad?

  1. #11
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    firstly i must say that everyone on this forum has been such a great help. wow its nice to know that there are people out there willing to put all they can into helping someone else! i decided to go along and download the diskeeper program and it is amazing, it runs in the background when im not busy on my computer and i dont need to switch it on and off, also it gives me loads of stats about ny hard drive, thanks for the go ahead on that one, you guys should check it out, you never know what dangers lie out there when you download a program off the net.
    thanks a bunch to everyone

  2. #12
    just me duncan drennan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by grizzley View Post
    i decided to go along and download the diskeeper program and it is amazing
    Grizzley, how about contributing to the conversation instead of just trying to promote a product? As has been pointed out before, we are all about trading knowledge for value, and I am sure you have more to contribute than you are letting on.
    [SIGPIC]Engineer Simplicity[/SIGPIC]
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    Dave A (06-Aug-08)

  4. #13
    Platinum Member Marq's Avatar
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    Does he have any advice on Anti-virus scans? They pound the poor hard drive too.
    Here you go Dave - fresh off the scanner - from PCFormat aug 2007 - Luis's helpline column on Virus checkers.

    Viruses? Pah!

    Now, virus-checking. That's a whole other kind of stupid.

    Do you take anti-malaria tablets every night and sleep inside a mosquito net? No? Why not? Malaria is a deadly disease that has probably killed more people than any other disease in human history. So what if you don't get malarial mosquitoes in this country; better safe than sorry, right? In fact, why not go further? Why not vaccinate yourself against every disease ever? Let's get someone to isolate every single pathogen in existence - including those that don't affect humans, those that aren't harmful and those that went extinct years ago. Let's get them to create vaccine for every single one of these and then inject the resulting three pints of serum into our arms once a month. And even though this frequently leaves us unable to pick up our arms, drive a car or even remain conscious, let us happily pay for this service.

    I am not advocating unprotected sex with strangers here. Computer viruses are not a lethal plague sweeping the world. It's more like hay fever. It's a mild itch is all, and not very contagious. I have 14 computers running a slew of operating system versions, all continuously connected to the net They have been infected by two viruses since 1990. One came on an infected floppy disk, neither resulted in a loss of data only minor slowdown and was completely cured in an hour using only a free scanner downloaded from the web after infection.

    Prophylactic use of anti-virus software is both unnecessary and a very common source of software conflicts. So why does every other piece of print and online advice recommend that you install a virus scanner and keep it up to date? Because it feels like the precautionary principle, the conservative approach, the belt-and-braces tactic. "Yes," the argument goes, "in theory the masses could keep themselves safe by showing some common sense about which executables they download and which email attachments they open. Yes, they could use Opera instead of IE, avoid warez and download updates as soon as they become available. But what if they don't? Wouldn't it be irresponsible of us to not also recommend a virus scanner if it could provide some additional protection, no matter how small?"

    If virus scanners did not cost money, had no false positive alerts and never caused your system to crash, I would say yes. But in fact they do all those things, and so it becomes a trade-off. Are the disadvantages of installing a scanner more than the disadvantages of not installing one? In my view they are. There is a reason why step 2 or 3 of every troubleshooting flowchart is "have you disabled any automatic virus scanner?" Now since I have already said that I'm not going to be drawn into defending an unnecessarily extreme position, I will admit that there are times when you want to run a virus scan on your hard disk. When you have symptoms that can't easily be explained by any other means or you have a specific error message that Google matches to a known virus, then it makes sense to run a sweep of your hard disk. But there is really no need to install a commercial virus scanner for this. The free online one at www.trendmicro.com is perfectly good. Yes it may have a slightly smaller virus signature database than the best commercial systems but, really, it's not going to make any difference.

    Virus infection is overwhelmingly the least likely thing to go wrong with your PC and infection by an obscure virus that is only caught by the gold-standard scanners is so unlikely that you can discount it. Sure, it could happen. But your PC could be trampled by escaped cows - do you have specific measures in place to deal with that contingency as well? None of this will convince you of course, I'm perfectly well aware of that But just because you're stubborn, doesn't make me wrong. So far, everyone else reading this has been treated to one clever guy with lots of letters after his name saying one thing and another clever and handsome guy saying something else. There is no way to tell which is right.

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    Dave A (06-Aug-08), Graeme (06-Aug-08)

  6. #14
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    haha sorry Duncan wasnt trying to promote in anyway, stumbled apon it my accident just thought that i would first ask about it to see if it was legitimate, and just like evryone was so nice to me thought i would repay the favour by letting everyone know where their advice lead me.

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    Gold Member irneb's Avatar
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    I might be wrong, but I think I heard (or read) somewhere that the standard Windows Defrag is actually a scaled down version of DiscKeeper ... might be wrong, but the name rings a bell.

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    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    That wouldn't surprise me. There can only be so many ways to tidy a hard drive.

  9. #17
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    hmmm thats quite interesting, where did you read that, because it seems to be A MAJOR change from the in-built defrag, like that one doesnt have any stats and stuff to keep you up to date like diskeeper has. but then again i am no expert, thats why i turned to the forum for advice

  10. #18
    Site Caretaker Dave A's Avatar
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    My first thought was if I was going to strip down a product, the first thing I'd do is get rid of the fluff.

    But maybe the question is: What sort of stats do I really need to know about my hard drive that actually makes any kind of difference to me?

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