Puran Defrag

Regular defragmentation keeps your disks tidy and avoids the big, disruptive defrag jobs later on. The defragmentation utility in Windows does a pretty good job, so why would you need an aftermarket defrag tool like Puran Defrag Free Edition? Well, Puran is easier to program to run automatically, even in the background. Puran also defragments your PC's boot sectors for faster start-up, and its Intelligent Optimizer boosts your system's speed, according to the developers. It can also defragment selected files or folders only and make exclusions by file and folder or wild card. There's even a command line option for advanced users.

Opening Puran also opened the program's very good Help file, which made for an easy start. The first thing we noticed about Puran's interface was the cluster map field. The omission of a defrag cluster map in some recent Windows editions raised eyebrows and hackles, and many developers have responded by restoring the feature. Puran's is attractive and legible, as we found when we ran the tool. The program identified our two disk drives; we selected one and clicked Analyze. It clearly showed fragmented data. We clicked Defrag, and a progress bar (blue, not green, for a change) tracked Puran as it defragmented our hard drive. We could also select Low Priority and Shutdown After Defrag options from the interface. On the Additional Operations tab, we could select from an extensive list of check boxes specifying actions such as freeing space for temporary files, excluding files by size or other options, and filling gaps with blank data to avoid frequent fragmentation. We could also enable the Puran Intelligent Optimizer (PIOZR), which boosts system speed. On the Automatic Defragmentation tab, we could set Puran to defragment either of our drives, including several automatic boot, restart, and shutdown options, and check a box to stop automatic defrags when on battery power.

We're all for free utilities that improve on the built-in capabilities of Windows, and Puran Defrag Free Edition is a great example of the type. It's especially useful as a "set-and-forget" tool that will keep your disks clean and your system fast through regular background maintenance.