For this week’s FreewareFrenzy, I’m going to take a look at a little app called Diskeeper Lite 7.0.418. This is a handy app made by Diskeeper as a way to introduce their other, fully-featured software.

Installation went very quickly. Diskeeper installs a program menu entry as well as a desktop icon without asking.

When you first open Diskeeper, and each time thereafter, it will greet you with an Orientation message. The message explains that Lite contains the same advanced defragmentation technology employed in the Full versions. Lite is locked into Normal priority mode, which may lower productivity as it runs in the background. Of course, the full version has five levels of priority. Diskeeper goes so far as to say: “It far outperforms any other manual defragmenter available,” and that “while it is the only true solution to the performance and stability degradation caused by fragmentation” (say that ten times fast) the full version contains the features you really need. In case you haven’t picked up on it, Diskeeper Lite really wants you to upgrade to Full. In fact, there are four places to click and Upgrade; two buttons on the main window alone.

So after wading through the marketing mess, I took a look at what Diskeeper Lite can do on its own. Lite has three main areas, Analyze, Defragment and Smart Analyzer. Let’s look at each in turn.

Analyze is very similar to the analysis that Windows Defragmenter does before it begins. As you would expect, different colors denote different types of files, Red for fragments. As you can see in my screenshot, my drive was heavily fragmented. The actual scan took an incredible four seconds. Afterwards, a report pops up to tell you how terrible your drive looks. Diskeeper not only explained the importance of defragging, but also how it can help. I was curious about my results, so I went to the Action Menu and looked at my Report. I could print or save the analysis if I wanted to document where my fragments where, how many existed in each directory and how large they were. Not surprisingly, the largest one was in my Temporary Internet Files, which I delete regularly.

Let’s see how Diskeeper defragments my 80GB drive. You can Pause, Stop and Resume defragmenting, but I just let Diskeeper do its thing. In less then one hour, Diskeeper had reduced my 35,979 fragments to just one. Impressive results indeed. Windows defragmenter can take twice as long.

Smart Analyzer is a process named DKservice.exe that runs in the background. It takes up 3.7MB, and periodically scans your disk for imperfections. If it believes the disk is becoming too fragmented, it will let you know how bad the situation is so you can run a scan. However helpful this feature sounds, it is very overly anxious to defragment. I received a message that my disk was at a point where fragments could have negative effects on my system’s performance only one day after my initial scan. That was less then 6 hours of up time. While Windows certainly never reminds us to defrag, Diskeeper does it much too often. 

Diskeeper Lite has some extras. You can set up an exclusion list to skip directories and/or files when Diskeeper analyzes and defragments. The help file is also well made, though most of it merely explains the Full version features which you cannot try. I would have appreciated at least 30days to try these features, to test their usefulness.

So there you have it. Diskeeper Lite is an alternative to Windows’ own Defragmenter. While I’m not quite sure that it’s speed makes up for the lack of extras and constant plugs to upgrade and defrag, it is worth a try. You can download it here: http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207