Auslogics Blog

Recently I’ve noticed a lot of people on the Internet asking what’s the difference between defragmenting your hard drive and defragmenting the Registry, and why one should defrag the Registry anyway. So here goes!

The Difference

When you defrag your hard disk, defragging software finds fragments of a file, that are scattered all over your hard disk. Then it moves the fragments and groups them together, so that the file is all in one place. So, basically, defragmentation puts the files back together.

Badly fragmented disk really slow down your computer, so you should defrag once a week if you download a lot of files and install a lot of software, or at least once a month.

Defragmenting, or rather compacting the Registry, is a very similar process. The difference is that this time files don’t get defragmented – it’s only your Registry.

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If you have Vista, then for sure you have encountered this problem – your hard disk keeps churning and your Task Manager looks something like this:

Sometimes it would stop, then start again for no apparent reason. And what’s worse, frequent disk access interferes with your computer usage and makes life hard. Annoying, isn’t it?

Fortunately, there are some things you can do to tame the shrew and make your hard drive behave normally.

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Sometimes installing software or updating drivers doesn’t go as smooth as it should. If you’ve ever had trouble with installing an application and failing, Clean Boot might help you solve that problem.

I hope that most of you have heard of Safe Mode – a way to boot Windows using a minimalistic configuration to troubleshoot major issues. Unfortunately, Safe Mode is not good for installing programs, since it’s pretty restrictive.

Clean Boot is a less known startup mode and is great for troubleshooting software and driver updates issues. When in Clean Boot, your computer will load only programs that are absolutely required by the OS, but it will not apply Safe Mode restrictions.

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It’s not all about thinking of new mind-bending ways to optimize computers. Sydney weather has been great for a few days and we decided to take a short trip to Sydney’s Palm Beach. A quick lookup in Google Maps would definitely show the shortest way to get there. Well… at least that’s what we thought.

Who would’ve thought that our 56 days to Palm Beach would involve crossing the Pacific Ocean twice, visiting Japan and driving across Memphis, Kentucky and Georgia in the US!

OK, back to basics. Mate, where’s that 245-page map of Australia?

USB flash drives use FAT file system. And for a good reason – because NTFS has much more built-in features, it tends to be slower on smaller volumes.  But now that there are pretty large USB sticks out there, you might want to copy large files, like 4-5GB, to them. And for that you will need NTFS.

To enable NTFS on your USB stick you will need to format it to NTFS file system. Here’s how:

1. Right click My Computer and select Manage
2. Open the Device Manager and find your USB drive under Disk Drives
3. Right click the drive and go to Properties
4. Go to the Policies tab and select Optimize for performance and click OK
5. After that open My Computer and select Format on the flash drive
6. 
7. Choose NTFS and click start.

Now your USB stick is using NTFS file system.

Everybody knows what hacker attacks are and that they can cause a lot of harm. So, naturally, the best thing is to avoid being attacked, know how to detect an attack right away and act immediately. Unfortunately, hacker attacks can be pretty hard to detect, especially if you are a novice user. Here are a few tips to help you:

1. Suspiciously high outgoing traffic for dial-up and ADSL is the first thing that should attract your attention, especially if you’re not uploading anything at the time. So, if you notice that your outgoing traffic is all of a sudden unusually high, it could mean that your computer has been compromised and used either to send spam or viruses to all your contacts.  Cable users, don’t fret – with cable it is quite normal to have the same amount of outgoing and incoming traffic.

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Sydney, Australia – January 6, 2009 – Auslogics releases Disk Defrag with command line support. The command line options are among the most comprehensive and are suitable for silently defragmenting servers, workstations and personal computers.

Personal computers and especially file servers require frequent disk defragmentation for maximum disk access speed. Recognizing this, Auslogics team has come up with a new version of Disk Defrag that supports command line options. The new version can be run manually on a personal computer, remotely or via a batch file on a server.

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