Want to speed up your boot time? We're often asked how to make people's PCs boot quicker. There are a couple of options within PerfectDisk to do so:
Let PerfectDisk Manage:
This option is the recommended option and is selected by default . If selected, PerfectDisk optimizes the location of the files needed to start your computer. This decreases the time necessary to reboot your computer, so you boot quicker. If not managed by the Operating System or PerfectDisk, your computer could become unbootable if a file needed to boot the system is moved beyond the BIOS limit of your computer. This is a subset of the files listed in the layout.ini file (i.e. only those needed to boot the operating system).
Let PerfectDisk Manage all layout.ini files:
The file stores every file that is accessed from the moment you power up your computer to one minute after the desktop appears. By placing files on the disk in the exact order recorded in the layout.ini file, your machine boots faster. With all Windows versions starting with Windows XP through Windows 7, Microsoft includes a prefetch routine, which reads this file and loads the files in memory prior to them being needed. In this way, the operating system can access the files faster during boot up. If selected, PerfectDisk defragments and places all the files listed in the layout.ini file in order, starting at the beginning of your disk. This list contains all files loaded by Windows from the second you turn on your computer until about 1 minute after the desktop appears. This list not only contains the files needed to boot, but also the applications you routinely start after the system has booted.
Boot quicker and get to work...or play.
Computerworld's first issue of 2010 is out with its
Forecast 2010 Special Report, along with the headline
Ready to Roll. The premise? "IT budgets will be flat in 2010, but savvy IT execs are betting on new projects that have a big ROI and tap the best consumer technologies." Are ho hum topics such as defragmentation utilities, boot time defrag, and disk cleanup tools specifically in the report? No, but a lot that directly ties to defragmenting PCs is. Virtualization defrag, Windows 7 defrag, Windows Server 2008 defrag and a lot more are all connected. I'll be writing about some of these Computerworld topics and their relation to PerfectDisk and disk defrag software in coming posts.
And speaking of being ready to roll...the PerfectDisk 11 beta is too. We're anticipating our largest field test ever and are excited along with our testers to get it going. Because of the large number of testers at both the enterprise and consumer level, the test will be staggered a bit. So some of you may get access to the software before or after others. Please don't worry, you will be able to have at it soon. And I'll also be sharing bits about PerfectDisk 11 here from time to time and on up-to-the-minute news on
Twitter.
We appreciate your patience. As always, we're excited and looking forward to it all.
Here we go...
Related Post:
PerfectDisk 11 defrag -- on the horizon
Matthew McDermott is a principal consultant for
Catapult Systems and a Microsoft SharePoint Server MVP (Most Valuable Professional). Matthew writes about SharePoint and Microsoft technologies related to collaboration, web content management and productivity. Catapult Systems is a national Microsoft-focused IT consulting company that provides application development, enterprise solutions and infrastructure services.
A recent blog post by Matthew, entitled
Hard Disk Optimization on Hyper-V, relayed his recent experience with PerfectDisk to support his SharePoint 2010 demo environment. In order to support this environment, he used Hyper-V, and realized that he had some pretty big VHDs. Not that the large VHD files were a problem, but he wanted to optimize his disk environment. He chose PerfectDisk "because they have a comprehensive suite of options that cover every platform that I use (Windows 7, Windows Server, Hyper-V and Windows Home Server). One brand to cover all of your options, I love it."
McDermott writes about his experience and thoughts on PerfectDisk for virtualization defrag with Hyper-V, Windows Home Server and the Enterprise Console. He sums it all up with his "proof," which included a boot time defrag to obtain "the best possible defragmentation." Stating that he has "very simple requirements, make my drives smaller and don't impact performance." PerfectDisk delivered, allowing Matthew to recover 58.4 GB of disk space.
There's more, including "the aftermath." You can read about the follow-up and the entire exercise
here.
And defrag hard disk the MVP way.
One way PerfectDisk stands out is its ability to defragment all system files (including all NTFS metadata). System files are the designation that PerfectDisk uses to identify important files that the operating system uses at runtime to operate your PC. These include the Windows paging file (pagefile.sys), the hibernation file used to support sleep mode on desktop Windows PCs (hiberfile.sys).
Depending on whether or not the drive is a system drive, or some other drive that PerfectDisk can’t lock, offline file defragmentation may or may not run on the drive(s). As long as PerfectDisk can lock a drive for exclusive access at runtime, it will defragment system files immediately. But for a Windows system disk or any other locked drive — one, for example, where a paging file might reside in a whole or in part — attempts to defragment system files at runtime will usually fail.
These files are then defragmented if the drive is not locked. Otherwise, this occurs at boot time. PerfectDisk locks the drive for its own exclusive use, so it can then defragment and move files the operating system would otherwise not allow to be altered. So, a boot time defrag is really only mandatory for drives that cannot be locked at run time.
Occassionally when you schedule a boot time defrag pass in PerfectDisk, it doesn’t work. This is because PerfectDisk is unable to lock the drives during boot time, so the system gets booted without the defrag pass getting executed. When this happens, it is almost always because a third-party program has modified the BootExecute registry key so that PDBoot.exe (the name of the PerfectDisk boot time defragmentation executable file) is no longer the first entry in its value string. This entry must occur first in that key for boot time defrag to run correctly. Another possibility is that a third-party software product has opened the drive for write access before PDBoot.exe can mount the drive for exclusive access. If the drive is open for write access, PerfectDisk will not run a boot time/offline defrag in order to avoid potential damage to or corruption of system files.
All system files…to complete the drive and boot quicker.
When looking to Windows defrag software for Windows 7, there are various defrag programs to choose from and decisions you need to make. Do you want to be able to do a boot time defrag in order to defrag metadata? Is free space consolidation important? Do you want to boot quicker? Are you running any disk cleanup tools? Are you going to defrag Exchange databases?
There may be many more questions and requirements. Or your list for choosing between defrag programs might be short and sweet - you want a faster computer. One criteria that many people look for is certification from Microsoft. To some, it's just a "feel good" thing. To others, it's critical. And to some, it means nothing.
To us, it's important. We know there are many people that look to certification from Microsoft. And we know that many businesses have a requirement that they will only run certified applications. So PerfectDisk is certified by Microsoft for Windows 7.
In reviewing a disk defrag program, you might ask yourself why a particular product is not certified by Microsoft. For example, one area that Microsoft focuses on is overly-intrusive installations and snap-ins to the operating system - if a disk defragmentation tool is overly intrusive, Microsoft won't cerify the product. Look, with all the positive feedback Microsoft has garnered from Windows 7, it is not about to put a stamp of approval on an application that takes away from the positive user experience people are receiving from the new OS. Microsoft also made changes to the boot process in Windows 7, and we modified PerfectDisk to address these changes.
So one can choose to tell the world that certification doesn't matter and the fact that a program just works with Windows 7 is good enough.
We choose a different path for our users -- no risk.
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