markem

There are a large number of defragmenting programs available. Many are for free. I have Perfect Disk v14 installed. I have found a problem with the software. There are times when a space fits a file perfectly. But PD moves the file out to the end of the hard drive, optimizes it, and then moves it back again. Over and over and over until I stop PD from defragmenting the hard drive. Raxco so far has not responded to any of my support tickets. (I have two.). Defraggler is my go to program when PD starts to act up. It just works. I have twelve 4 TB hard drives (HDDs). I do not use SSDs because years ago I did have an SSD hard drive. One day, a thunderstorm came through, ZAP!, no more SSD. Lost all of my work. So now I have all of these HDDs in external hard drive cases which (so far) have never failed. The main hard drive is also an HDD and also has 4TB of space on it. However, now I am looking at the new 1TB SD cards. I had gotten one of them a couple of years ago but when I tried to put files onto the card - it suddenly became corrupted. So I went "I'll give it a couple of years so they can iron out these kinds of problems". Now 1TB SD cards are down to $68. (Of course there are the El Cheapo ones for $20 which really are just 8GB or maybe 64GB SD cards with mucked up software that says they are a 1TB SD card. Don't buy them. But SanDisk and PNY and Lexar now have 1TB SD cards for around $90 each. So I am thinking I may start buying them and transfer everything over to SD cards. Did you know that you can buy holders for SD cards that are like the USB Hubs you can buy? Yeah. So now you can have eight or ten or more SD cards plugged into it and use it like regular disk drives. Anyway, I have something like ten different defragmentation programs which I have downloaded and tried. But so far Defraggler is still the best out there.

I'm sure someone else has already made this suggestion but on the off chance they haven't.... CCleaner can run the uninstaller and it can clean your registry and remove temporary files. But what it won't do is to run the uninstaller, go look for and remove any/all files and/or directories the application made, and remove it completely from the registry - at the touch of a button. How would it know if a particular file, directory, or registry entry was associated with a given program? It can make smart decisions but what I am thinking is that it just produces a list of possible files/directories and allows the user to select which ones they want to get rid of and then do the same for the registry entries. For example, I just uninstalled BitDefender. I also had to go in and look for all files and directories named BitDefender and remove them. Then I went through the registry and looked for and removed all entries named BitDefender too. It would have been nice to just click a CleanUp or CleanItUp button and have CCleaner do these steps for me. Especially since CCleaner is probably a whole lot faster than the Windows Search program or the registry's search facility. Just an idea. Otherwise - terrific product! Mark

Money is tight and going to get tighter. Remember the early 1900s. First things got bad, then good, then bad again. Probably what is going to happen again. So why am I bringing this up? The new policy of asking for $25.00 may not sound like a lot of money to Piriform but for some - it is a lot. So I'd like to suggest that Piriform put two buttons/ways of supporting Piriform. The first can be the asking for $25.00 (so it shows first) but below that I think Piriform should place a "...or donate" section where someone can donate money to Piriform in any amount. Then, when someone comes to the site they can do either. So in months when money is really tight - someone can send $5.00 or $10.00 and in months when money isn't so bad - maybe they can do the $25.00.

Final update: After recovering all of the files Recuva found on the disk drive I tried to do a quick format on the drive. That failed. So I tried a low level format and that failed as well. There is definitely something wrong with the disk drive. I'm just glad I got all of the files off of the drive I could. Thanks again for making Recuva available! A science teacher thanks you guys! :-)

Ok - I finally hit the cancel button. The number of days jumped from 44 to 46 in ten minutes. There is definitely something wrong with the drive but I think it already had all of the files in the list. It is 29% through restoring the files and there are 246 files recovered so far. There are a grand total of 4096 files. A somewhat suspicious number as it is a factor of two. As I am sitting here watching Recuva is stuck at the 29% mark saying it will take 15 minutes to complete.

As far as I know it is USB2. I've checked the system's Device Manager and it is showing as USB2. I've seen when it (the system) selects USB1. I get a message "This device could run faster...". Didn't come up when the drive was attached. Recuva is now saying it will take 44 days to complete. Green progress bar hasn't moved and I can not leave it to do that. I'm going to give it until tonight before I hit the cancel button. I've used Recuva before in the past. Nothing like this has ever happened. I'm betting there is a bad place on the disk somewhere that is getting hit.

WOA! Hold your horses! I just checked the computer and lo-and-behold there is a single green bar and it says 3 DAYS LEFT to finish! Gack! Guess I'll let it run.

External USB drive. Non-system drive. Ran chkdsk against it and it did not recover any files. I've decided I've given it long enough. I'm going to stop the scan and restore the files it has found. I'll let you know what happens. :-)

A friend had a problem. They dropped their 320GB external hard drive and now it says there are no files on it. I am running the latest version of Recuva on it to get the files back. It has been running for five days non-stop. I made sure to first update Recuva before running anything. Which is why I said I have the latest version. I ran Recuva for two days, then had to leave town for a funeral and I wanted to take my system with me. So I stopped the recovery. After two days there was a huge list of files. This was a good thing because I had feared that the program had run into a bad spot on the hard drive and that that was what was causing the long delay in the program's running. Anyway, I booted up another of my computers, updated Recuva on that one, plugged the drive in to it, and restarted the recovery process (deep scan mode). That was on Wednesday last. It has been running ever since. My questions are : Should I stop it again and just recover the files it has found? Is there the possibility that there is some kind of a bad spot on the disk drive and so the program is doing some kind of a loop because of it that is causing the software to just run for days? My thoughts on this are that I should stop the program and just recover what it has found in the last five days. According to Task Manager, Recuva is using 0% CPU (however the disk drive light keeps flashing showing that it is in use) and it only has 17MB of memory used. So whatever it is doing - it isn't gobbling up a lot of memory. Which means it is maybe just doing the same thing over and over. Thoughts everyone?

Thank you!

I attempted to defrag my C: drive the other day (after weeks of working to recover my system because of my own stupidity - and no - this problem is not because of my own stupidity! At least I don't think it is. ) Anyway, I noticed something after about 36 hours and wanted to pass it along. I had set Defraggler to run, one time, a defrag of the C: drive starting around 3:00am and running until whenever it got fiinished. I was, at the time (midnight), copying some huge vido files (captured from one of my DVDs and I knew it would take a couple of hours for the copying to finish. So I go to bed and the next day I get up and Defraggler is still running in the background. (This is the df.exe program - not the GUI version.) Defraggler runs all that day, all the next day, and finally after about 36 hours had gone by - I rebooted the system. After rebooting the system I brought back up Defraggler and almost nothing had been defragged. This is the weird part. Before I scheduled the job I took a look at the disk drive via Analyze. It was almost entirely red. After df.exe had run for almost 36 hours I was expecting things to be almost all blue. But no. It was almost all red. I had not done anything while I was waiting for df.exe to complete except run Task Manager so I could see if df.exe was still running. So then I decided to just run Defraggler via the console program (or rather maybe I should say the GUI interface). It took about four hours for Defraggler to defrag the disk drive (320GB). So that's the strangeness I ran into with Defraggler. Unknown why it did it - but I haven't tried it again via the scheduler since then (as I have six very large disk drives I need to defrag and I know the GUI interface works without a problem. I'm running 1.18 (updated last Friday). Suggestion: Defrag white space. Although Defraggler does a great job on defragging the files I can not find any option to defrag the whitespace. If it is there let me know but if not - this would be a great addition to what Defraggler can do. The only other suggestion I would have comes from Norton's Speed Disk. Or rather the old Speed Disk Mac OS v8.0 had. That was the version of Speed Disk which gave true power into the hands of the user. You could select from putting everything at the end of the disk, the middle of the disk, the front of the disk, or even just certain types of things at the beginning, middle, or end. I would always put documentation at the end of the disk drive because any/all help files usually do not change very quickly. So plain text files, chm (or rather the Mac's version of chm's - forget what they were called now) would all go to the end of the drive while executables would be towards the front. Since I program, my executables would be read/executed faster and the compilers would also compile faster because they were at the front of the drive. All of the .h, .c, .pl, etc... files were all kept at the end of the disk drive. Anyway - like I said - just some ideas. :-) Next time I get paid I think I'll donate some more money. Can't afford much, but maybe $10.00 for each of the big three. :-)

I thought I'd start a wish list for things people would like to see in Defraggler. Here's mine: 1. A progress bar on the movement of the large files to the end of the disk drive so we know the program hasn't gotten stuck. 2. More colors so the different type of files can be identified (so maybe System files, ini files, exe files, dat files, etc....) 3. An option to have the defrag happen from the center of the disk drive outwards towards the edges of the drive (faster file access). 4. Maybe info on the size of the file being moved? (This would help people not think the program has stopped working if they knew the file was 10GB or so. :-) ) I realize that the type of file being moved (and the size) has nothing to do with whether the file is defragged or not - it's just a human failing to want to see things while they happen. Mark I realized, after I had posted, that you CAN already state what you think a big file is. Sorry about that! :-/