Talk:Vopt

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on September 18, 2007. The result of the discussion was keep.

[edit] Advertisement??

What a load of nonsense. Each statement can be verified and I can't see any hype or exaggeration. --Donn Edwards 15:30, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Verify them then... And there definitely seems to be some hype to me, for example "Its method of defragmentation is highly efficient, winning loyalty from users for the short time it takes to process the drive" Nil Einne 12:56, 30 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Security Now Discussion

Transcript of Security Now podcast #88

Leo Laporte: Yeah. Babak in San Jose, California asks: I was wondering if you could comment on which hard disk defrag and maintenance tools you prefer. I’m referring to tools that run under Windows. What do you use to defrag and maintain your disks? Besides SpinRite.

Steve Gibson: Well, certainly SpinRite for sector-level maintenance. There is a defragger that you’ll know well, Leo, probably. It’s still around, and it’s my favorite. It’s from a company called Golden Bow Software.

Leo: Oh, that’s still around.

Steve: That’s Vopt.

Leo: That’s the one that Jerry Pournelle would just sing the praises of.

Steve: Yes. And I’m still doing so. I’ve become less and less impressed by Microsoft’s defragging. I find that when I use the defragger in XP or especially Vista, Vista they just took all the meat out of it. I mean, it’s just amazing. I’d like to see...

Leo: You’re not supposed to really need it, though, with NTFS, are you?

Steve: I know. But just it feels good. It just feels – I don’t want all these little red teeth all over my hard drive. I like everything to be in little blue blocks. And so anyway, Vopt is my favorite defragger. It runs, I’m not sure about Vista, but certainly all the way through XP. And I’m sure they must have a version now because Vista’s been around long enough. Anyway, they’ve kept it alive. It does a very good job. It’s got a whole bunch of really nice features.

The thing that’s built into Windows, there’s a disk cleanup which is something I also recommend that people use because it empties your trash, it throws away a whole bunch of the cached stuff that your Internet Explorer browser has downloaded. I mean, and many times, in many cases, hundreds of megabytes of just stuff you really don’t need. And so when you run this, it will get rid of that stuff. Vopt has an even more thorough version of that that does a better job, a deeper job of cleaning up really the debris that the systems accumulate over time. And it is the case also that defragging your system will mean less wear and tear on your hard drive. It’s the head moving which will create wear and tear. And that’s what causes heat. If a drive is just sitting there idling, or not moving the head a lot, it will run cooler than if the head is flying back and forth all over the place.

Leo: It is possible to over defrag and make it worse. In other words, you shouldn’t run these things every day because then you’d be doing the opposite. You’d be overexercising your drive.

Steve: Yes. You’d be putting the drive through more work than it wants. And there is also something, a sort of a SpinRite-ish benefit to defragging, and that is that it does cause your system to revisit areas of the drive, and it allows the drive to see that it’s got problems that it might otherwise not be aware of. SpinRite, of course, does it from zero to a hundred percent. I mean, it does the entire surface. Defragging doesn’t guarantee you that, but it’s another sort of a good thing to do, just sort of, you know, shake the dust loose from the drive.

Leo: And by the way, Vopt is available for Vista, does work with Vista, $40 at Vopt.com.

Can we include this is the article? 41.243.121.208 21:43, 20 September 2007 (UTC)