List of Best Free Disk De-fragmenter – Download Freeware

Posted by Webmaster Blog 24 September, 2009

My top recommendation here is Diskeeper Lite [1], an older free version of Executive Software’s current commercial Diskeeper product. It works very well indeed given that it is V7 while the current commercial product is at V10 but I’ve had a few complaints from subscribers about the annoying nag screen. I have no magic fix for this but there are other free defraggers worth considering.

Auslogics Desk Defrag [2] is fast, has a nice disk map, lots of stats and is really easy to use. It’s pretty basic but its simplicity and speed make it a good choice for many users.

Even simpler is IObit SmartDefrag [3]. It works away in the background to keep your PC constantly defragged. It’s only a beta at the moment but the feedback I’ve received has been excellent. A true “set and forget solution.”

Another possibility is “Contig” [4] from SysInternals, a robust, free, command line utility which defrags one file at a time. It’s fast, and safe but is a pain to use however eXcessive software has built an excellent user interface for Contig called “Power Defragmenter” [5] that turns Contig into a really usable product.

Update: Thanks to Vashek Weis for letting me know about how you can get version 9 of Diskeeper Lite. It forms part of Intel’s large (89MB) Desktop Utilities package which is available from the Intel site [6]. If you unzip the file you’ll find Diskeeper V9 Lite in the folder ../3rdparty/Diskeeper/. Neither the read-me file or the License Agreement prohibit downloading and using this program on a single computer so it appears to be a perfectly legitimate way to obtain the program.

[1] http://www.majorgeeks.com/Diskeeper_Lite_d1207.html Freeware, all Windows versions,12.1MB
[2] http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag/index.php Freeware, all Windows versions, 1.4MB
[3] http://www.iobit.com/SmartDefrag/index.html Freeware, all Windows versions, 4.3MB
[4] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/Contig.mspx Freeware, NT and later, 55KB
[5] http://www.excessive-software.tk/” Freeware, NT and later, 397KB
[6] http://www.intel.com/design/motherbd/software/idu/