Diskeeper

Hard drive suffer the most visible effects when they are used for long periods of time. They slow down the operating system more and more as they are being used, due to data fragmentation. While you can clean up the hard drive and defragment its contents with specialized utilities, Diskeeper can help you prevent fragmentation altogether. This lightweight application ensures that Windows will write data in a clean fashion, without leaving any gaps. Additionally, the software can use your computer's RAM for heavy-duty caching, which can increase performance significantly.

Diskeeper is free to try for 30 days, during which you can use it without any restrictions. Downloading and installing the software doesn't take more than a minute, on a modern-day system and it doesn't involve any complicated settings. It can be used on all popular Windows versions and it is also an excellent solution for Server editions and it works even on virtual machines.

There isn't much you have to do, besides running Diskeeper on your computer. The software works quietly in the background, making the operating system avoid fragmentation while writing data on the disk. You can bring up a user interface, through the application's system tray icon, which displays a wide range of statistics. You may also access a configurations menu, where you can adjust the application's behavior, with only a few simple clicks.

The software displays the percentage of eliminated I/Os, the time you have saved when reading and writing data, as well as the prevented and eliminated fragments on the disk. Additionally, you can get more in-depth statistics about I/O performance and various charts, on separate tabs. It is also possible to filter the presented information, if you wish to see your performance statistics for the last day, week, month or since you have installed the application.

Besides preventing fragmentation on the disk, the software can also increase performance through its IntelliMemory feature. Diskeeper's dynamic memory caching capabilities can make your system read and write data faster, by using idle, available DRAM. This means that your hard drive won't bear the extra burden when the operating system needs to read and write temporary information. What's more, this feature works in such a way that it won't use up you memory and slow your system down.

Thanks to its smart functionality, simply running Diskeeper on your computer is all you have to do to make your operating system fast and stable for much longer and do away wit regular disk defragmentations.