UltraDefrag – A Powerful Open Source Defragmenter for Windows

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UltraDefrag is a powerful free open source Defragmentation tool designed for Windows platforms. It defragements not only the regular files but also system files including registry hives and paging files, on popular windows file system, such as FAT, exFAT, and NTFS.

It comes with a binary version and portable version. While portable version gives you portable feature the binary version offers a few more advanced features, such as boot time scan, explorer integration, etc. It also comes with a command line tool that you can use to schedule the defragement job through Task Scheduler. If you have it installed on your computer, it will have a context menu integrated into your Explorer to let you easily do file or folder level defragement.

UltraDefrag 6.0.2 Portable 2014 08 01 15 46 33 600x387 - UltraDefrag - A Powerful Open Source Defragmenter for Windows

You can use the Analyze (the magnify glass icon) to analyze the currently selected disks to generate a report that shows the free space, folders, fragemented, compressed, rgular and system files, before starting a real defragment process.

UltraDefrag has 4 ways of doing Defragment,

  • Defragment (F6) – to move the fragemented files to free space to concatenate them.
  • Quick optimization (F7) – to move the fragemented files to the back of free space at the front and moves them back to the front to concatenate them.
  • Full optimization (F8) – to move fragmented and regular files to the back of the disk to free space at the front and to move them back to the front to concatenate them.
  • Optimize MFT (shift + F7) – to optimize the MFT by placing its fragments as close to each other as possible.

All methods seem to be fairly quick to process and finish. You can monitor the process right through the problem window as it updates the cluster map and status bar constantly during the process.

One of the big problems when doing defragment is that none of the defragment tools are able to defragment locked files while Windows is running. To solve this problem, UltraDefrag includes a new mode that allows you to run it at boot time before any file locking, so it can defragment almost everything, including all system files, hibernation and page files. All you need to do is to enable Boot Time Scan in the program. Note that the Boot Time Scan is only available in binary version, meaning that it has to be installed on your computer.

UltraDefrag boot time - UltraDefrag - A Powerful Open Source Defragmenter for Windows

UltraDefrag works on both Desktop PC and Server supporting almost all Windows system, back from Windows NT all the way to Windows 7, 8, and server 2008 R2 and 2012. It’s also compatible with both 32-bit and 64-bit of Windows editions.

A few important notes

While UltraDefrag is a very powerful disk defragment tool, it doesn’t necessary mean that you need to use it at all situations hoping to improve your computer performance. It’s worth mentioning that do not defragment if you are using a SSD drive.

The use of disk defragmentation is not recommended on flash memory or solid-state drives (SSD), as it may reduce the lifespan of the drive. As flash memory does not rely on physical movement to read the drive, random file access is much faster than a mechanical hard drive, so defragmentation is not necessary.

You may also ask why we should use any alternatives while built-in defragment tool in Windows 7 and 8 is already superb to all previous versions and many 3rd party tools on the market. Well, here is a comparison chat that may explain itself why you at least should consider using it.

UltraDefrag An Open Source Defragmenter comparison chart 2014 08 01 17 24 30 600x594 - UltraDefrag - A Powerful Open Source Defragmenter for Windows

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