Donn Edwards

I have settled the court case! I plan on doing a review of Defraggler using my dedicated test PC. I can't say when, but it will be in 2009. The BS meter comes from dvorak.org/blog

I may have mentioned this some time back and several versions ago. > Are you having icon problems in the Tool > Uninstall listing ? No > Have these problems always been there ? Yes, on previous versions as well. > Thanks for mentioning Vista Home Edition.I forgot to ask. > There have been some strange Vista 64bit problems relating to Administrative privileges seeming to work in reverse (Administrator not getting privileges and User getting them). My version is Home Basic 32bit, and it's possible I'm getting the reverse priviledges, but I can't tell because there is only 1 user. I am led to believe that the way to make the product Vista-compliant is to have a service installed that does all the "Admin" type stuff, and a client that can run in limited priviledges. This strikes me as a really bad idea because its going to result in a gazillion different services running that don't need to run. Could you perhaps put an icon next to any option that requires the UAC? My guess is that emptying th browser cache is NOT one of those actions, but perhaps deleting old prefetch data would require it.

Dear Davey Thanks for your kind comments. Unfortunately Microsoft has imposed the UAC on users in order to get them to pressure their software suppliers to reprogram their apps to work correctly with Vista. Talk about arrogance! I raised the problem here in the hopes that the excellent programmers who write CCleaner could have another look at this disaster called Vista. We bought my wife's HP laptop with Vista Home edition in February 2007, and immediately encountered some teething problems. SP1 has solved some of them (I can now print from my WinXP laptop to Penny's shared printer) but not all. I'll probably write about it sometime soon. Please visit www.mg.co.za or www.thetimes.co.za for better SA news coverage than I can ever provide. I only write about what affects me directly. One thing I've not mentioned is the weather. We are going into "winter" and every morning the sun streams through the window in my study and warms up my chilly bones. Night time low is 6 degrees C yet I haven't had to use a heater in my study for the past 3 weeks. SA has the chinese curse of living in "interesting times".

My wife's Vista laptop has one user, which is also the machine administrator. Every time I click on "Run CCleaner" from the Recycle bin, I get the dreaded Vista UAC (User Annoyance Control) which takes 10 seconds to load, and 10 seconds to do anything else after clicking "yes". Needless to say, running CCleaner automatically on startup does the same. What settings cause this to happen? I can't see anything in the beginner's guide (yes, I did RTFM) and there are no icons next to any of the delete options (unless I'm blind) so what's going on here? I have disabled UAC for now. Maybe I should just leave it off

"I understand it is beta software" ... hence my detailed feedback. Does anyone on the development team read this stuff, or are we just wasting our time doing testing?

I am a great fan of CCleaner (except version 2.0) and so I was keen to try our Defraggler. I love the name. It reminds me a lot of the Defrag-A-File utility that I reviewed in "The Great Defrag Shootout". I understand it is beta software, and initial tests with small files looked promising, so I copied a 5GB data file into a compressed folder in WindowsXP to see what would happen. It's the "stress test" I use for all the defraggers I have tested. DF took around 8 minutes to analyse my drive, which is almost as bad as Diskeeper, but not nearly as bad as some others tested. By comparison, JkDefrag took less than 2 minutes. During the analyse process my processor utilisation stood at 99%, making the machine almost unusable. When I clicked on the check box and said "Defrag" and answered "Yes" (I hate that dialog box. Please make it go away!) the program did a lot of thinking for around 19 minutes, and not that much disk activity. At 19 minutes the progress indicator got to 100% and remained at 100%, and the cpu usage was around 99% until the 30 minute mark, when it dropped to around 50% and there was a lot more disk activity. at the 42 minute mark, with the 100% progress bar still visible, the disk activity reamined busy and the cpu usage went back to 99%. At the 52 minute mark I ran out of patience and clicked "Stop". The hard drive activity reduced almost immediately, but DF spend another 4 minutes "stopping", whatever that means. At the 56 minute mark I restarted Windows, and it took another 3 minutes to shut down. Not good. On restarting I find that the file has only 5 remaining fragments, but the analyse time is still way too long. Clearly there is a problem with the % defragmented progress bar. I know the little revolving circle is very "Windows Vista" cool, but it gets irritating after you have stared at it for 10 minutes or so. PLEASE could the development team add a status indicator somewhere which shows which file the program is busy with? A % indicator is fine when it keeps changing, but when the % stays the same for several minutes it says nothing useful. Clearly there is a lot more work to be done on this product, but it looks encouraging. I particularly like the "Open containing folder" option, which has allowed me to find and delete a lot of spurious log files with lots of fragments.

I'd be happy with simple file masks, like c:\Program Files\LogMeIn\LMI*.log That would get rid of a lot of accumulated junk. Thanks for a brilliant product!