O&O Defrag Professional Review

Overall, I would say that the O&O Defrag V8 Professional edition is not that much better than it's free competitor, Windows Disk Defragmenter, but it does have more bells and whistles. My impression is that the O&O stands for "On & On" in the way that program keeps requiring action from the user instead of just getting on with the defragging.

For instance, there is a wizard for installation and one for on-going use (or perhaps it's a setup menu designed to appear each time you open the program although you can turn it off). There is also a Tips and Tricks pop-up that requires your action to turn it off as well. It also doesn't save your settings without telling it to do so. And it doesn't not install simply or uninstall completely.

I do think that options are great, though. One distinct features is that you can set the defrag to run automatically as a scheduled task. However, if you know how to setup the Task Scheduler in Windows, then you can do this for free, but this is a bit easier.

The interface is nice with customizable cluster "blocks" which can be made smaller by pixel or the color can be changed to help more clearly identify the numerous types of status that the clusters are in. I changed my "Being Processed" clusters to a bright green, which makes the display more interesting and understandable. I found that not all of the features really work well and some don't work at all. Turning off "XP Style" is such a minor cosmetic change that I'm surprised they have it so prominently featured. Turning off "Shading" does change the blocks from a pure color to a lighter/purer color to indicate the degree of the color, but this seems to be pretty useless considering how prominent the feature is.

There do seem to be some bugs with this program, but they are more cosmetic than anything. For example, the "Pause" button does not change when you click it, so you don't know for sure if you have paused it or not; how you can tell is by looking in the System Tray because that icon changes.

There are several modes of defragging but it's hard to quantify which works better without identically-defragmented hard drives. This seems to do a better job of defragging than the Windows Disk Defragmenter if it is to be believed that it does what it does, however, it doesn't seem worth it to pay $44.95 for it. It's not so clear that it's a better tool.