O&O Defrag Professional Edition 29.1 Build 11201

Overview

Every one of us should make a priority out of squeezing the very maximum speed from our PC, and one of the most effective techniques that can be applied for instant results is a good defrag session. As a result, your hard drive layout is optimized for the best performance. You should be happy to find out that there aren’t many tools on the market that are as versatile and feature-packed as the O&O Defrag. This handy little tool offers multiple ways of acquiring information on the levels of fragmentation of your hard drive. In fact, there are no less than eight built-in defrag methods that you can use. The final results can also be customized and files can be sorted by several parameters, such as last access, name or modification date.

Installation

The setup kit of O&O Defrag measures around 20 MB and whilst there are several paid versions, keep in mind that you can always try the free trial and then upgrade to enjoy the full functionality of this defrag tool. There are three versions: the professional, family and server edition. The installation process is easy and fast and you can simply click your way through the wizard as O&O Defrag doesn’t install any third party software on your system. A two-step configuration process awaits you at the end of the installation. Although it is not mandatory, the benefits of the program are presented to you. Regarding the supported operating systems, O&O Defrag will work on Windows 8, 7, Vista and XP.

Interface

As soon as you launch O&O Defrag, your drives are immediately analyzed before the tool provides you with some detailed reports. The total number of fragmented files is revealed, as well as a list of the largest files on your system, the most fragmented files, fragmented system files, locked files and a lot more. This amount of information can be a bit overwhelming if you are new to O&O Defrag, but don’t worry as guidance is the key word here! The graphical user interface is well designed and provides you with multiple ways to optimize your PC. The clean and clear interface boasts a lot of functionality and you will be able to set up basic defrags in just a few minutes!

Starting with version 16, a time view display showing the tangible benefits of defragmentation over time was added.

Pros

A great defrag tool should encompass good performance and have lots of features, as plenty of options coupled with poor performance isn’t exactly a match made in heaven. Firstly, in the performance department, O&O Defrag is one of the best tools of its kind, as it only needed 12 seconds to optimize a lightly defragged drive running Windows 7. What is more, you also get a “Before and After” screen that shows you just how much your drive changed. Keep in mind though that a full-scale optimization and defrag will take much longer but the best thing about this tool is that, after a first and lengthy defrag process, you can keep it in the background for maximum efficiency. And what about the end results? Well, boot times are faster and all of your software will be snappier in their launch time. Thus, the benefits are small yet measurable.

If you’re still not happy about your system’s performance, O&O Defrag implements some tools for advanced users, as its low-level optimization rules can be tweaked. Basically, your files are separated into three zones: a zone for data, one for software and another one for rarely used files that you can move to the slowest part of your drive. What is more, adding new rules for these zones is an easy task and at the end of the day, everything in a given folder can be optimized easily by your own personal preferences. The History tab is extremely useful feedback about your defrag performance and can be easily visualized.

SSD drives are all supported and by that we mean that they will not be defragmented, not even if you're running O&O Defrag with Automatic background defragmentation. Running a defrag on a SSD drive will not increase its speed at all and further more, it will reduce its lifespan. O&O properly detects all SSD drives and avoids running defragmentation tasks on them. You can read more on O&O Defrag and SSDs here and here (PDF).

Latest changes

Improvements in version 16 include a more intuitive user guidance, even faster system and program starts, improved defragmentation with time reduced by up to 40%.

Version 17 adds "Thin Provisioning", which optimizes hard disks in virtual machines and SANs and "Automatic deletion of free space". This will increase your privacy and so far, O&O Defrag is the only defrag program to include such a feature. Support for Win 8.1 is added as well.

Cons

Novice users can feel a bit intimidated by the large number of features.

Alternatives

Alternatives to O&O Defrag include the following tools: Defraggler, Auslogics Disk Defrag, MyDefrag, Smart Defrag, PerfectDisk, UltraDefrag and a lot more. However, compared to O&O Defrag, they are quite limited.

Conclusion

All in all, O&O Defrag many not be for everyone, but it is highly configurable and is a feature-packed tool that’s surprisingly lightweight! O&O Defrag is an excellent choice if you are looking for something better than the run of the mill freeware alternatives.