If you were an early adopter for the 64 bit versions of Windows XP or Vista, you will have encountered a desperate lack of third party support, both paid and free. Among the conspicuously absent utilities were non-Microsoft tools for optimizing defragmenting your harddrive.

To the rescue comes JkDefrag, a refreshingly simple but powerful utility that works as good or better than anything else out there. We can thank Dutch programmer Jeroen Kessels for this handy utility.

First of all you don’t need to install the software. Just copy the program to somewhere handy like a memory stick or USB thumbdrive) and launch it.

Second, there are no complicated menus.

Third, the default setting defrags files and moves files to where your hard drive has to work LESS to access them. And guess what? Moving files to optimal locations extends the life of your hard drive. Fourth, it runs faster than Windows defragger, runs in the background and does a better job of optimizing your hard drive than Windows (any version, and both 32 bit and 64).

Finally, JkDefrag runs in safemode so it can have all your computers resources without the interference of other silently running software.

Now, sometimes software this simple may ask the user to take few little extra precautions. JkDefrag is one of those.

When you use a program in Windows it will often lock access to files it uses until long after the program is finished. So it’s best to run JkDefrag automatically at night. Alternatively you can manually unlock any files by using Unlocker. (Sorry, as of this writing Unlocker only works well with 32 bit versions of XP and Vista).

You should also run Windows Disk Cleanup before JkDefrag to get rid of temporary files and other junk. (Right click on a hard drive, select properties and click the Disk Cleanup button.) This way only the files you really need will be defragged and optimized.

And the last precaution, JkDefrag may not play nice with your antivirus. And we haven’t tested this software with very many antivirus software packages, but this precaution comes right from Jeroen, so we take him at his word. He recommends you stop the antivirus (such as pause active scanning) before running JkDefrag.

JkDefrag comes in a couple other flavors; the command line version gives you access to all the options offered by this powerful software, and there’s a version that includes a screensaver which will hide what’s on the screen as it works its magic. And if you’re a programmer, you’ll find a link to the open source for the program.

Read Jeroem’s website for other tips, such as why you should buy a bigger hard drive to get the greatest gain in speeding up your computer. He’s got a lot of great info worth ingesting.

JkDefrag is compatible with Windows XP, XP 64 bit, Vista and Vista 64 bit.

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