Unbiased review of hard disk utilities

01.07.2010 · Posted in Computers & Networking

It works for my PC desktop perhaps because my desktop has plenty spaces left (60GB) but it has some quirks when I tries to defrag my son’s laptop. The laptop has 40GB hard drive and only has 3.5 GB spaces left because the kid has a ton of animate movies downloaled. It doesn’t complain about there is not enough space to defrag but instead going its normal way to restart then defrag the drive. Later it bombs out and complains that there is not enough space. What a stupid software because it should be possible to calculate the spaces required for a task.
That should be a telltale sign about its weakness but I was to preoccupy with something else so I delete and compress some files to raise empty spaces up to 5+ GBytes then defrag the drive again. This time, it complains that it has read errors and the laptop now can’t boot up. I don’t really know what it did, perhaps it overwrites the boot table, the MFT etc because after I remove the hard drive and connect it to my desktop as an USB drive, there is nothing on the drive, no directories, no files, nothing. All’s gone. I’ve never seen a defragment software that causes a problem like this in my 30 years plus dealing with computers because there is always safeguard to move sector by sector, so the worse you can get is one file lost. Not the whole drive like this. Needless to say, I remove the Paragon hard disk suite off my computers forever. [yahooquestion]hard+disk+utilities[/yahooquestion]

It’s known to us that there are some backup files creating when installing a Windows hotfix or service pack update. Hence, a restore job will be easy when necessary. After studying, we found that it becomes a true fact that these backup files will only take up hard disk space, and a cleanup of the old backup files with windows update will free up more available hard disk space so as to effectively maintain it.

For all computer users, at some point or other, they will find that the hard disk is becoming smaller and smaller even thought they have not installed any program on the computer. One main reason is the junk files on the hard disk. To clean up the disk garbage, it is very easy for us to use the Disk Cleanup utility provided by Microsoft by simply going thorough: My Computer -> right click the drive to be cleaned up -> Priorities -> press Disk Cleanup within the General tab, after that, please select the file types you want to delete within the popping-up windows. Hence, you can easily get rid of some unwanted junk files from your computer. But please note that, there is another type of junk files existing in the hard disk, which takes more hard disk space and normally can not be cleaned up by Disk Cleanup utility. That is windows update files.

So to more hard disk utilities effectively maintain hard disks and free available space, it is necessary for you to delete these windows update files from the computer. Since these files are stored in hidden folders, first you have to make them visible: open My Computer, and then Tools to select Folder Options, and then go to View at the top, tick Show hidden files and folders within the tab “Hidden files and folders”; and then please go to C:\WINDOWS, here you can see some files named begin or end with “$”, for example, “$NtUninstallKB943460$”. These are windows update files. However, if days or weeks pass and your computer is running perfectly without any problem, then it is time to delete those backed up old files from your hard drive.

But that is not enough to just delete the backed up files on the hard disk for there must be some leftover entries left in the registry, so it is still needed to check the registry to delete some associated entries. Normally, it is possible for you to delete the entries beginning with K8 within the tab HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, which will not affect the proper running of the windows.

After the steps to clean up the windows update files above, you will regain more available free space. Then you can store what you like on the hard disk without worrying about the limited reserved space.

But here, it is necessary to mention that in order to maintain the hard disks, a cleanup of the hard disk junk files is far from being enough. When storing files or programs on the computer, there will be some disk or file fragments occurring, which hardens the workload of the hard disk head, making it move too much to access the file to be read or wrote. Thus shortens the lifespan of the hard disks. So a simple disk defragmentation is needed to maintain the hard disks in order to store the same files at a same place and easier to get access to.

In a word, to maintain hard disks, it is necessary for you to not only delete the system junk files, but also regularly defragment the hard disks. If you do not know how to quickly defragment your computer, try Advanced Defrag here. It will help you easily and quickly defragment any drive.