FreeWare Review: IOBit Smart Defrag

Jason Ward — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 05:42:19 +0000

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).

IOBit’s product is, without question, the most polished free defragmentation software available today. Its interface is simple and intuitive, it is updated with a frequency that very few freeware programs are, and it’s highly effective at what it does. Beyond just being an on-demand defrag tool, Smart Defrag also has a fair number of serious features. It supports scheduling so you can set your defrag to happen when it’s least intrusive to you (middle of the night? Daytime while you’re at work? Your call!). It supports Auto Defrag, which tries to keep your files from fragmenting to begin with and kicks in a defrag cycle whenever your PC is idle for 5 minutes (or longer, configurable by you). You can configure the software to run whether you’re logged in or not (requires credentials with a username and password), whether it will run at boot, etc. What’s best about all these features, though, is that they’re configurable by you.

Unlike a lot of commercial products, which features you use are configurable by you on a one by one basis. You’re forced to use pretty much nothing with this software, which makes it a real pleasure to use and more importantly, to forget you’re using. If you prefer the software only run on demand, you can do that. If you want it on in the background you can do that too. It’s your choice, and choices are always nice to have.

Final Judgment: Highly recommended, probably the best free defragmenting tool on the market

Website and Download: IOBit Smart Defrag

FreeWare Review: IOBit Advanced System Care 3

Jason Ward — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:00:11 +0000

Most people probably haven’t heard of IOBit, but if you use a PC at all you really should. IOBit provides some very interesting free software that I’ve enjoyed using for about a year now, and I’m happy to be able to report that their software is both high quality, professionally polished and updated damn frequently. It’s with this idea in mind that I introduce today’s Freeware Review product, Advanced System Care 3.

Just what is Advanced System Care? Let’s start with the basics. Advanced System Care will help you remove spyware threats from your system, inocculate against future infection by scanning for and plugging known vulnerabilities in the OS (read: Windows flavor) you use, and it will check for items that can be optimized to get a little better performance out of your system. If you’re a user of some of their other free products it’ll integrate with those as well.

Beyond these more obvious tools, Advanced System Care also has a set of tools to perform tasks such as defragmenting your Windows Registry (Yes, it actually helps), backup or update your drivers, optimize your TCP connections in Firefox or system-wide, defragment and free up RAM (the usefulness of this process is a topic of much debate, but there’s no conclusive evidence that it either helps or hinders your system from my experience. It also seems to depend heavily on the tool you use).

Perhaps the nicest part of these additional tools is that, unlike other comprehensive sets of system tools where everything is enabled automagically and ends up actually slowing your system down, all of ASC’s tools must be enabled manually by the user. Therefore if it gets jacked up it’s your own damn fault; on the bright side, ASC is quite diligent in reminding you to set a Restore Point prior to taking any actions that could potentially harm your system, so most hiccups should be a no-brainer to recover from.

So you know: There is also a paid version of Advanced System Care 3, the Pro version, which offers a few extra features. If you’re a serious power user you might want to consider a purchase, but I really believe that the vast majority of people will be more than happy with just the freeware version. Last but not least the software will ask if you want to install the Yahoo Toolbar and set Yahoo.com to your search page default. If you already use the toolbar, hey, why not? But it’s entirely up to you and you are not forced to install either option. Personally I don’t.

As with any Freeware product, if you really like the software, consider making a small donation to the developer. Even a buck or two can help support a broke coder

Final Judgment: Highly Recommended (I install it on anyone’s PC I help fix)

Website and Download: IOBit Advanced System Care 3

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FreeWare Review: IOBit Smart Defrag

FreeWare Review: IOBit Advanced System Care 3