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Full user review
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"Avoid! Makes thing worse with a FAT32 drive"
Pros
It worked OK on my NTFS drive; it reduced the fragmentation from 2% to 0 in about a half hour. That drive is 36GB with 36% free space. System is Windows XP. As it worked, I could see the number of files and file fragments going down in the status window. That was nice.
Cons
Failed completely on a FAT32 drive. Same system: this smaller drive is 18GB, 36% free space, but it is FAT32. Started with the Windows defragmenter leaving me at 3% fragmentation. Defraggler worked for around *2 HOURS* and the result was 6% fragmentation! Then I attempted to defrag free space. OOPS! This increased fragmentation to 10% !!!
Also, the "time remaining" display was just bizarre! It starts out saying 1 minute, then after 10 minutes, it jumps up to an estimate of 6.5 hours! Then a few minutes later it is down to about 3.5 hours, and 15 minutes later it says 4 hours. But it actually needed about 2 hours. In contrast, the the time estimate seemed quite accurate on the NTFS drive.Summary
As far as I can tell, defraggler is totally lost when it comes to a FAT32 system. It seems to be reading and moving files that are already defragmented. It also seems to be reading the free space. I am simply observing the colored boxes as it works and cannot say what it is really doing, but I do know that I had to go back to the Windows defragmenter to get the drive back to a reasonable state.
WHEN IT ASKS IF YOU WANT TO REPLACE THE WINDOWS DEFRAGMENTER, JUST SAY NO!!!! At least make SURE that you are comfortable with before doing that. NOT when you install it.
I really have to wonder if they hired some programmer guru who didn't know anything about the FAT32 file systems and he just BSed them into not testing for that. At a minimum, there should be some warning to let people know that the software won't work with FAT32 drives so they don't mess things up. And since they said nothing about it, I CANNOT recommend this software, and have to hesitate about recommending ANY software that comes from these guys.
