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World of Warcraft (WoW), Fallout 3 and more on Windows 7 -- defrag game time

Lewis Allard, from Colorado Springs, is a 25-year old programmer for a major defense contractor. While at his job he gets programming performance boosts from PerfectDisk, I'm writing today about the performance improvements his systems get while playing video games. Lewis plays a wide variety of games, with World of Warcraft probably being his favorite.

WoW is big -- it takes up 15GB for the game and another 1.5GB for patches, which Lewis keeps on hand in case he needs to reinstall and repatch. As he says, "even by today's standards, it is a HUGE game." Another of Lewis' favorites, Fallout 3, takes up another 6GB. Lewis originally purchased PerfectDisk to increase his framerate in WoW's most populous areas, such as major cities and player versus player battlegrounds. Not only did PerfectDisk help improve his game's frames per second (FPS), it also improved the time it takes to load World of Warcraft (and other games). Lewis points out that "obviously some factors of loading into the game are out of control of the computer due to the games online connectivity, but the overall time was significantly lower than previous logins without PerfectDisk.                   

When Lewis moved to the Windows 7 Beta, he knew he would need the same firepower he had previously to keep on top of his games. He found that "on Windows 7, logged into WoW sitting in Dalaran (the game's most populous city), I could get roughly 20-45 FPS, depending on the time of day. Those aren't bad frames on a game that runs 11 million-plus people worldwide, but I felt I could do better with PerfectDisk." Sure enough, he got to 35-50 FPS in the same situations.

Just ask Lewis...if you're going to take on the world, you better have the best tools.

                          

Related posts:

• Beyond WoW to Club Penguin -- MMORPG for the family
• Win the WoW war on MPQ files
• Is PC gaming dying? 10 million WoW users say no
• Selected files -- a new way to boost World of Warcraft performance
• World of Warcraft -- defrag your MPQ files
• World of Warcraft -- Beef up your game

 

Defrag stuff that works

                      

"I love stuff that works." That's how Alex Webley's blog about business and personal life starts out in a recent post about PerfectDisk. Alex describes himself as a corporate and business coach, life coach and counselor. His "approach to business, as in life, is to seek out and implement best practice" in areas in which he loves, enjoys and excels in. His overriding philosophy? "Life is too short and valuable to do otherwise" and he wants to "help as many people as possible" before he leaves this world. 

His is not a technology blog. But in the case of PerfectDisk, Alex has found a tool to help him in all his other pursuits, and feels it will help others in theirs. Alex writes that "because I use computers so much I need top quality applications that enable me to stay productive. Getting bogged down with computer maintenance or technical issues is not good. Running a computer defrag (defragmentation) regularly is a smart thing to do."

                            

He writes that he has tried a number of computer disk defragmentation programs, including Windows own built-in method, over the years. But he's "found one program which met my exacting standards. That program is PerfectDisk which I have been using now since 2004. My research indicated that Perfect Disk is the best Defragger and use has proved it."

He goes on to state that he has spent "enough time on research to ensure that what I obtained was the best for our needs. PerfectDisk was the clear winner by a long way. We especially like the way the software does a high quality defrag while we are working - we therefore suffer no loss of productivity or valuable billable time. The time spent researching to get things right from the start paid off."

He ends his post telling his users to "benefit from the time and effort I spent in getting making the right choice."

On a global scale, we've all seen what the wrong choices can lead to around the world. 

Now more than ever, making the right choice is critical. Stuff that works. 

                       

SSD Defrag -- one man's story

Robert Otis is a PerfectDisk 10 Pro user, having installed it on his Lenovo Thinkpad, which has two solid state disk drives. Robert uses one drive for programs and applications, and the other for his data. He's programmed Microsoft Disk Cleanup to run at 8:15 p.m. each night on each drive. He schedules PerfectDisk to run thereafter on each drive. Robert tells us that he "can tell that the drive gets very fragmented each day, so a defragment is necessary, on a solid state drive just as much as a rotational drive."

"It's really a 'perfect' program," says Robert.

                    

Related Post:

Solid State Drive (SSD) support in PerfectDisk -- standard

Shine up Chrome with PerfectDisk

                         

Google's Chrome web browser has crossed the 1% market penetration threshold (1.15% according to Wikipedia), which may sound small, but when taken in light of the number of web users around the world, still adds up to a significant number -- over 10 million.

                                      

One of the things we've noticed here, along with many of our PerfectDisk users, is that Chrome creates a LOT of temporary internet files (or Chrome cache files) -- more than IE, Firefox and others. Cache files grow incrementally, resulting in heavy fragmentation when these files are deleted, and there can be thousands of such files depending on the size of your cache. This results in slower PC performance and slower startup performance.

               

PerfectDisk has found a home with many Chrome users. You too can put a shine on your Chrome browsing with PerfectDisk.

Defrag Chrome.

Artificial? No. Smarter? Yes. Your MFT? Just fine, thank you

                      

I've written about this before, but since we still receive questions or comments on this topic, I'm doing so again as a review. Uses sometimes ask us why PerfectDisk does not change the size of the Master File Table (MFT). Other defragmenters do it and, hey, changing something seems pretty cool. Well, this is another area where we think PerfectDisk is a little smarter.

When an NTFS drive is formatted, it creates the $MFT, which contains a fixed number of records which can used. As files are created, these records are used. Eventually, the pre-allocated number of records is filled up and the $MFT needs to grow, adding another chunk of file records. Immediately adjacent to the $MFT, the MFT Reserved Zone is created. By default, the MFT Reserved Zone is 12.5% of the drive and goes from the first record of the MFT to the first non-free cluster after the last MFT record. If you have a 100GB drive, then the Reserved Zone is going to be 12.5GB - quite large! If you look in the Windows Explorer/Properties on a drive, the free space shown is the total of both INSIDE and OUTSIDE the Reserved Zone.

The MFT Reserved Zone is created specifically to allow the $MFT to grow in a contiguous fashion. When the $MFT fills up, it allocates the next chunk from the free space located in the MFT Reserved Zone. NTFS will avoid putting files inside the Reserved Zone unless you get into a low free space condition. It is not necessary to artificially pre-allocate additional space for the $MFT in order to keep it from growing fragmented. 

A smarter MFT means a smarter defrag.

                  

A defrag RFP for the home user

With the federal government about to get much larger, the biggest swarm of consultants, "Beltway Bandits" and the like are already starting to infiltrate the Washington, DC area, home of the US government and your favorite defrag company. They're looking for a piece of the stimulus pie and anything else that comes along. Contracts for government work are awarded via the RFP process, or Request For Proposal. In an RFP, an agency or company specifies the criteria on which they will make a decision for a particular product or solution.

Well, in case any home users want to play government agency and put together their own RFP, here's a list to help get you thinking:

• The defrag tool must be certified by Microsoft. When a hard drive fails, you want to eliminate possible sources of the problem.
• The defrag solution must run automatically in the background, using only idle resources.
• The defragmenter should provide the ability to regularly schedule defrag runs when automatic background defragmenting is not possible.
• The defrag tool should defrag a drive in a single pass, rather than slowly chipping away at the problem. Once and done.
• The defrag tool should provide multiple defrag and optimization strategies according to a user's specific and unique needs (e.g. being able to defragment a specific file or set of file).
• The defrag solution must consolidate free space into the largest piece of contiguous free space possible in order to reduce future fragmentation and minimize resource consumption.
• The defrag tool should defragment with less than 1% free space on the drive.
• The defragger should provide an automatic file recycler to recover space.
• The defragger should provide a duplicate file finder to save space.
• The defrag utility should provide a set of space reports and tools to analyze file and directory usage and allocation.
• The defrag tool should be able to defrag SSD drives effectively by consolidating free space and not require an extra-cost option to do so.
• The defrag tool should be the one most recommended by Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs).
• The defrag utility should support unlimited drive sizes without an extra fee. 

These are just a few things to think about as you do your own analysis and "RFP." As always, we recommend trying products side by side and seeing for yourself.

Do your own thing. Make your own decisions. And if you end up with a great defragger from a company that has the defrag solutions for the 21st century, you will have done yourself proud.

And aligned yourself with the US Patent and Trademark Office, FBI, National Institute of Health, and many other government agencies. As well as Gibson Guitars, Subway (the sandwich guys), Fosters (the wine and beer guys), Marvel (yea, Spiderman), and other cool companies.

You get it.                           

Win the WoW war on MPQ files

                            

The Dow may hit 10,000 again someday and World of Warcraft (WoW) interest may wane someday, but for now, both seem a long way off. Blizzard Entertainment's wildly popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) now boasts over 11.5 million monthly subscribers. And many of these subscribers are PerfectDIsk users, who we hear from all the time.                         

Gamers such as WoW players are always looking for ways to boost their system's performance and do whatever tweaking they can to get an advantage. So naturally, defragmenting files is an aspect of that, along with total free space consolidation. 

But time after time, day after day, two things in particular for WoW players stand out with PerfectDisk -- AutoPilot Scheduling and Selected Files defrag. A nasty problem for WoW players is WoW's MPQ files, which include data, graphics, sound and more. MPQs can get large and they can get badly fragmented. And the result is lost performance.

So lots of WoW users use PerfectDisk to completely defragment their drives, including the MPQ files, to boost their performance. Because of PerfectDisk's free space consolidation, they will fragment more slowly anyway. Many users will use Selected Files Defrag to clean up the MPQ files. And WoW players also will use AutoPilot Scheduling to ensure a complete defrag after receiving a WoW patch from Blizzard.

                                       

Winning the WoW fragmentation war one drive -- or one file -- at a time. Automatically.

The first month

                      

We're just under a month in, and even our high expectations have been exceeded by the response we've received on PerfectDisk 10. Even as the opening night has passed, it's been a record-breaking month here for product downloads as well as favorable reviews. Here's just a sampling:

• "improves performance big time"
  "raised the bar for all competitors, leaving them behind."
  Softpedia
• "buy PerfectDisk 10. Period."
  "it's faster than any other defragmentation program...an inexpensive tool that just works." about.com
• "nothing comes close"
  "I highly recommend PerfectDisk 10...I will be using it."
  Colin Brown, Microsoft MVP
• "the defrag equivalent to a Harvard student on a caffeine high before his finals"
  "overall, I would recommend PerfectDisk 10 to anyone desiring any sort of performance and capacity increase on their computer, as it completely puts any other defrag program I've ever utilized to shame..." 
  OCModShop
• "Go get it. Love it."
  "...among the very few pieces of software I recommend everyone actually purchasing, rather than finding freeware versions that are similar."
  2PhatGeeks.com

To see full articles and reviews,click here.

               

We'll keep raising our bar.

Shortening laptop's boot time -- PerfectDisk plus HyperSpace

                     

One of the big benefits of PerfectDiskis faster boot times for laptops, PCs and even servers. There's nothing like the agony of being all ready to get to work - or play - and having to wait for your machine to boot. So defrag helps your normal day-to-day use, but also boot times. And for those laptop users among us, the wait can be even longer. But using PerfectDisk really does help get your machines booted faster.

                             

In the February 23rd edition of Business Week, Stephen H. Wildstrom writes about some new technology that helps you get to work on your laptops almost immediately. HyperSpace from Phoenix Technologies helps you get onto Windows almost instantly. There are a couple of versions, including one that lets you run both HyperSpace and Windows at the same time, with Windows running in "sleep mode" while working in HyperSpace. You can read the article here.                            

And with PerfectDisk also speeding up your boot times, it could be a real winning combination.

About.com -- PerfectDisk 10 is a must buy

                        

About.com's tag line is "Guidance. Not Guesswork." In its PC Support section, the huge web site that provides guidance to consumers on just about everything has just come out with a PerfectDisk 10 review by Tim Fisher. A few extracts:

• "Buy PerfectDisk 10. Period."
• "The defragmentation capabilities in Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP are barely comparable to PerfectDisk 10."
• "PerfectDisk 10 is fast and effective with a minimum footprint. That's hard to find in a program of any kind."
• "It's an inexpensive tool that just works."
• It's faster than any other defragmentation program I've tried. It doesn't overload my CPU and RAM like many utility programs sometimes do."

• "You won't be sorry." 

You can read the entire review here.