O&O Defrag Professional Review

When Windows NT 4 came along, it did not include any third party utilities, and so the market for third part disk defragmentation tools started to grow. With Windows 2000 came a simplified version of Executive Systems Disk Keeper, however it lacked many of the features that power users came to rely on; There is only one method of defragmenting volumes available to it's users, and it's really slow at performing it's job.

One of the features I really liked about it is how it handles the defragmentation of multiple volumes. It will put off defragmenting a volume if it is on the same physical disk, which could theoretically reduce wear on the drive, while also focusing its work on that volume. It's also consistent with how the Windows interface functions; if you select multiple drives with the CTRL button pressed, it will create a pane in the lower half of its window, showing an additional graphical representation of each selected volume.

It also provides you with a system tray icon, which makes pausing it really easy to do. For me the only oversight of this feature is that the tray icon does not bring up the application which means you have to re-open O&O Defrag if you decide you want to add other defragmentation options.

O&O Provides an "offline" defragmentation option, which is great if you have a particularly large hard disk with a lot of files. For those less savvy, the MFT, or Master File Table, starts as a specific size, but will often grow as you add files to your hard disk and exceed it's initially allocated size. This is in part because this is where NTFS (the default Windows 2000/XP file systems) stores information about the files on the hard disk. As you can imagine, the option to defrag it is invaluable, since it can enhance the time it takes to access files. I should also note that this option is available with every well-written Defragmentation utility.

The only version of O&O Defrag available is the Professional edition. While this initially sounds like a negative point, It is worth pointing out that it's another value it provides the purchaser; the features available are comparable to what you would get with Disk Keeper Professional Edition, but at half the cost.