Diskeeper 2011 Home with Hyperfast: utility software

Diskeeper 2011 is a utility for defragmenting hard disks that replaces the standard built-in Windows disk defragmenter. The company has plenty of experience in this area, as it supplied the technology for the defragmenter included with Windows XP.

A fragmented file is one in which the data it contains has been spread around widely separated parts of the hard disk, making the file slower to open when it's needed. If too many of a PC's files are fragmented, overall performance can slow down dramatically.

Although all Windows versions include a disk defragmenter, it can only be run manually. Diskeeper 2011 runs constantly in the background, preventing files and folders from becoming fragmented in the first place. Manual defragmentation can also be done at any time.

It was very simple to install, and the program automatically configured itself to enable protection on all available hard disks, although these settings can be changed later if needed. The version we tested included Hyperfast, which can defragment solid state disks (SSDs ), including USB memory keys. These cannot be safely defragmented with normal defragmentation tools, so if you use these it could be a useful tool. If not, choosing the standard version without Hyperfast saves around £6.

There are few settings to change, but users can choose which hard disks to defragment and whether to use automatic defragmentation or not. For the majority of users there should be no need to change anything, and we found that after a day or two our PC's hard disks were completely defragmented (we confirmed this with other defragmentation tools). The program replaces and disables the Windows defragmenter, so there's no chance of conflicts. It took up very few system resources and doesn't even install a taskbar icon, so in use it is completely transparent.

The main menu was quite confusing, with lots of performance statistics and graphs, but these are quite technical and don't really serve much purpose except to convince users that the program is working properly.

Despite that, Diskeeper 2011 does an excellent job, and is a great way of keeping the files on a PC's hard disk optimised with the minimum of effort.