When Windows NT was released and with Windows NT the NTFS file system, everyone said “NTFS doesn’t fragment”. When the first defragmenters for NTFS were released, we got to know how untrue that statement was.

Back in the Windows NT era I bought Diskeeper and was quite satisfied with it until it destroyed one of the partitions on my hard drive. I didn’t use it since then. A feature-striped version of Diskeeper was built into Windows 2001. I used this defragmenter for some time. It worked OK, it didn’t kill any partitions, but it didn’t perform too well and doesn’t till today. To really defragment a partition with it you’ll need to run it several times and even then it won’t do a very good job.

Then some 2 or 3 years ago I stumbled upon PerfectDisk. It worked ways better than the integrated defragmenter. Often it only needed one pass to defragment a partition. And it even had an offline defragmentation mode for defragmenting system files. Since I still had a grudge against Diskeeper because of that lost partition, I didn’t test it. So I cannot compare PerfectDisk with Diskeeper as it is now. I can only say that PefectDisk worked pretty well all the time I’m using it.

The new PerfectDisk 8 comes with a convenient screensaver mode. As soon as the screensaver is started, PerfectDisk starts to defragment the drive. You can use any screensaver you like. There is no visual output from the defragmentation in that mode. You’ll only hear your HDD working while it’s being defragmented.

Since I bought my current computer nearly two years ago, offline defragmentation didn’t work. Somehow the CMedia driver for the sound chip on my main board prevents it from starting. But there is a workaround for this. You need to disable the driver, start PerfectDisk and schedule an offline defragmentation. After rebooting the offline defragmentation starts without problems. Then again after loading Windows you’ll have to reactivate the driver. That’s a minor annoyance in my opinion. It’s still a perfect defragmenter and recommendable.

I’m using Firefox since its RC1 release. In the meanwhile RC2 was released.

The theme has changed a bit. It has more gradients now, but that’s OK for me. A nice addition is that the icon for closing tabs is now on the tabs themselves and not on the right side of the tabbed pane.

The greatest feature for me is the integrated spell checker. At least I could get rid of the Google toolbar which was slowing down Firefox considerably. Now any text I type into some textarea is automatically spell checked. From time to time I have to change from English to German and back again, but that’s easily done.

All of my extensions except the Delicious extension are working fine with Firefox 2. I really hope the Delicious extension is updated sometime soon.