The ever gracious public relations team over at Raxco Software (Hi, Sherry!) were nice enough to provide the 2 Phat Geeks with an early release copy of Perfect Disk 10 Professional. Those of you that read my series on keeping your computer running should be familiar with Perfect Disk as one of the few paid utilities I actually recommend spending your hard-earned dollar on. The 2008 version of the program was the first interaction I’d had with any Raxco software and I was more than pleased with the result. Perfect Disk 10 has done nothing to diminish that.
In essence Perfect Disk 10 and Perfect Disk 2008 are a great deal similar to the end user when it comes to appearance. The interface feels familiar, with most of the function located in icon and text menu bars at the top of each of the function windows. If you were smart and took a look at 2008 than Perfect Disk 10 should be easily accessible. Both versions seem to be taking a page from the Microsoft Office 2007 school of tabs and icon based menus for navigation.
The install itself was quick and painless, much like the prior version, and only takes a few moments before you’re up and ready to go. Standard options for regular updates and all that good stuff remain in place for this version. The prior version seemed to have updates on a pretty regular basis and I like seeing software refined throughout its lifecycle; most especially for system maintenance programs. Only one little gripe about the install process was that when installing, it wrote over the prior version using the old directory structure. I prefer newer software uninstall its predecessor and install itself into a new directory. True, this is a pretty minor gripe, but the less confusing my life is the better.
All in all, however, from download to install to first examination everything seemed like a slightly prettier version of the prior version.
Things are a bit different “under the hood,” though. The engine used for the PD10 system seems a lot snappier than it’s predecessor. I ran test defrags under Windows XP 32-bit (a very fragmented system, as well), Vista 64-bit (large volume, moderately fragmented) and Windows 7 64-bit (small volume, largely fragmented) and all of them worked not only flawlessly, as I had expected, but a bit quicker than similar systems under the 2008 version, which I had not. The inclusion of Windows 7 support is a nice and important addition since I, like many folks, will be moving to 7 as it releases. While I know this is unrelated to the Perfect Disk, I’ve been fairly satisfied and successful with Vista, but I really like what I see in Windows 7.
Both the vista and the Windows 7 defrags went quick like a bunny. Even though I had been using the prior version of Perfect Disk I did notice a slight increase in the disk responsiveness after the short defrag. The Vista hard drive is just over 260GB just about 50% full. Initial fragmentation was about 6% and it was finished in just over 17 minutes. On the same system, the Windows 7 disk, which is on a small 30GB test partition, ran in about 8 minutes after an initial fragmentation of just under 15%.
The XP Box was the hardest test drive I took in the software, as it was just installed, used older hardware and was pretty heavily fragmented. Initial fragmentation was just a hair over 45% on an older 7200RPM, 120GB Maxtor SATA Drive. The defrag was finished in just over 1 hour on a P4 3.4 with 2GB of RAM. For my money that’s pretty quick, especially considering how much more snappy the system runs following the process.
In addition to the apparently beefier defragmentation system, Perfect Disk 10 Professional also includes a nice suite of smaller applications for space management; handling duplicate and temporary files and the like. It’s a nice bit of added features for the space conscious, but with Hard drive space considerably cheaper than gasoline, it’s not making me tingly in the geek areas yet. I do like the inclusion of extra features wherever possible and pertinent, though and it’s well and simply integrated into the existing shell.
Apparently the enterprise versions of the software have complete support for the virtualization going on in the big machines these days, though I have no system using these technologies on which to test it on. To be honest, the enterprise and server versions of this software are amazingly feature packed and seem an even better deal, especially considering how quickly large network data drives become fragmented and slow… I work at a good sized credit union: I know!
So, for the tl;dr crowd: Perfect Disk 10 Professional is a decided improvement to is very worth predecessor and is among the very few pieces of software I’ll actually recommend everyone actually purchasing, rather than finding freeware versions that are similar. Go get it. Spend Money On it. Love it.
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