OK smartasses, you thought you had me, didn’t ya? You thought “Oh look, he forgot to post up a FreeWare review today”, didn’t ya? Yeah? Well…you’re right. I did forget. I suck! On the bright side, I did already have a plan for it, so we’ll go ahead and with that right now.

Today’s exciting Freeware pick is IOBit’s Smart Defrag software for Windows. Like virtually any defragmenting software it’s far superior to the built in Windows Defrag, but more than that I’d say it’s probably better than many of the commercial defragmenters currently on the market. As a Windows user, the need to defragment your hard drive is a simple fact of life. You either do it or you face a downward spiral of decreasing performance, slower access times for all your software and worse performance for Windows itself. Windows Vista is particularly bad about this; an untended drive can easily become 30-40% fragmented in a matter of weeks or months depending on use (though in fairness, Vista is far more resilient to fragmentation than earlier versions of Windows have been).