LONDON, June 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Companies rely on an optimal system health to achieve their objective. Because of today's larger files size, high capacity disks and dramatic rate of fragmenting files, one fundamental thing all Windows users need doing to insure high performance is to defrag their systems.

Defragmentation physically reorganizes the contents of the disk and stores the pieces of each file together to keep the systems optimized.

Not only is defragmentation itself necessary, the choice of defragmentation technology is also crucial.

Microsoft provides an in-built defragmenter. However, many IT administrators quickly realise that it cannot meet the requirements of demanding systems on a professional level.

For once, it is extremely time-consuming. The administrator needs to schedule the defragmentation process on each machine, one by one, when he could be servicing company employees or taking care of other essential system maintenance.

The process is awfully slow and extremely resource intensive. All other activities on the system have to be stopped. Therefore, defragmentation is often run at night or at week-ends, which inevitably leads to over-time costs. And to add to the frustration felt by all IT administrators who would rather be home with their wives and kids, there is no indication of how long the process will take and when the ordeal will eventually end.

You would think that such a lengthy and painful process will bring astonishing results, but unfortunately, this is far from true.

The in-built utility does not eliminate all fragments, nor tackles free space fragmentation. It does not defragment the MFT nor the paging files. All in all, the results are slightly better but stay superficial.

On the other side, companies who realise that the in-built utility is not a solution might favour an automatic alternative.

With a truly automatic defragmenter installed on the system - one that defrags in real time, as it occurs, IT administrators do not need to worry any longer about this aspect of computer maintenance.

Some automatic software on the market is coupled with a technology which does not allow the defragmentation process to impact on system resources. The user will not even notice that the software is running in the background.

Therefore, if you are serious about having an optimal system health, it is best to look into an automatic professional upgrade, where/when scheduling or manual operation is never required and performance constantly maximized.

Max Clarke - email: mxclarke@googlemail.com