I've read a lot of posts here about what defraggers people use and I'm ready to spend some money to finally get a good one, if need be. I've been looking at Diskkeeper among others but I can't tell which programs actually allow you to skip specific, designated folders and/or files. I really want this feature because I've been using IOBit's great freeware defragger, but it takes 2 1/2 days(!!) to defrag my scenery and textures bmp folders. (The rest of my hard drive is the normal 30 mins to an hour.)Can you all tell me which ones will let you exclude a folder and/or file and which ones you recommend? I would really like a freebie, but will pay if I need to, and I need to download one in the next day or two.Thanks in advance to the group.Chuck B.

I recommend the O&O Defrag, but it doesnt

Hi,I use PerfectDisk 8 Professional, as far as I know one of the best defraggers.Lots of settings, including exclusing of folders/files.I think they have a demo version available.http://www.raxco.com/products/PerfectDisk2k/

I would go with Perfect Disk also. It is not a resource hog, and it is fine software.I have never regretted going with P.D. 8.0It does have several different settings to choose from as mentioned earlier, but you really dont want to nor should you skip folders when defragmenting.It negates what you are trying to accomplish.

Freeware and it works great. Learned about it over at simouthouse awhile back. It's ease of use and efficiency got lots of converts over there. It has worked great for me as well.Auslogics Disk Defraghttp://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php

Ultimate Defrag by Dixtrix does just that. It can place all your flightsim program next to the MFT for quicker readability.Most of the PMDG crowd use it and they are nobody's fools.

I'm with Dave on this one, Ultimate De-frag is the best one that I have used personally now.I have tried three others, including Diskeeper 10.I like the way that you can put all of your FS items, and your Windows files on the outside, and all the other stuff on the inner tracks of the HDD.This does make for a much faster read/write time/access time to be cut dramatically.

Ultimate Defrag, definitely! I put all Windows and Flight sim files on the outer tracks and what an increase in texture loading performance I got. Even the MegaCity titles load all their textures, for once,even while flying. Now there are way less blurries.One suggestion though. I uninstalled most of my old games to clear off the hard drive, did a reinstall of FS9 for a clean copy and cleaned out My Documents of old junk. I then ran Ultimate Defrag which took a couple of hours to complete. But the nice thing is, once you do that, the program allows you to "respect performance" on later defrags and it will leave the outer tracks you previously reordered relatively alone, saving time in the future. It even has a nice graphical interface.Kim

Thanks for all your insightful comments! I'm trying Ultimate Defrag as of last night -- the 30 day fully functional free trial was the clincher! I was pressed for time so I just tried the "Automatic" setting and it defragged all 3 hard drives in less than 3 hours, which is a huge improvement over the 2 1/2 days it took iobit's package, but I haven't yet had a chance to check my performance since then. One general, good-humored gripe, though: does every, single developer out there REALLY think I have time to read a 63 page manual on every piece of software I need to buy? As a technical writer myself, I get annoyed when the how to or quick start instructions are buried 30 pages into the manual, as though every little detail about the theory of defragging is the only thing I have to worry about in my life?Oh, no, I did it again. A rant. :-)Thanks again, all.Chuck

UltimateDefrag is great, but has one drawback: even the latest version I tried doesn't do anything at the "offline" (boot time) defrag stage (it reports that this stage is running, but that lasts only for a second or so), whereas Perfect Disk needs several minutes shuffling the system files around.So, either Perfect Disk does something not needed (which I don't believe since they talk about the great way Perfect Disk arranges e.g. the pagefile during that offline defrag; and in fact I can see a difference (before/after) when looking at the colorful block graph after an "analyze") or Ultimate Defrag is unable to defrag system files (I'm inclined to believe that to be true since I tested on different systems)...Andreas

Hi,I haven't used the 'offline' defrag of PerfectDisk so far. Do you know by any chance if it matters that I have set the pagefile on a different disk (and drive)?Running multiple OS: WinXP on D, swapfile on C (different disk and drive)

I just found the 30 day trial version of Perfect Disk -- couldn't find it before -- so I'll give it a try in a month.You have to pay extra for 1 year of upgrades?Chuck

Doesn't matter.Offline defragging is nothing to let easily go and omit, but rather an extremely important step in the process of getting the drive(s) defragmented.Since during normal Windows operation, a lot of (often big) files are always held open and thus cannot be defragmented "online", offline defragmenting is needed and an absolute "must".I even need several such offline passes to get these files straight, similar to the several online passes needed.Why Ultimate Defrag does nothing is a riddle to me, fact is that there are fragmented system files present and Ultimate Defrag simply doesn't care.This disqualifies Ultimate Defrag for me, even when its online defrag options are great and unique.A system perfectly defragged with Ultimate Defrag is probably slower than one defragged with Perfect Disk 'cause Ultimate Defrag didn't defrag the pagefile, something which can be a real performance eater...Andreas

What exactly is "off line" defragging? I completely defragged both computers night before last with Ultimate Defrag and I got blurries like you couldn't believe -- almost as though Ultimate Terrain wasn't loading at all for minutes at a time. Can't say for sure that it was Ultimate Defrag that was the problem but I do know for sure that I've never had this problem before. Ever.I'm going to try the free version of Perfect Disk tonight and see if that has any positive effect -- kind of doubt it but we'll see how that works.I'd like to repeat my other question too: with Perfect Disk do you have to pay an extra $9 for 1 year of upgrades, or is that 9 bucks just for one year of tech support?Thanks again all.Chuck

Can you move a particular FOLDER in a partition to the OUTER part of the DISC for faster performance?Abe