14 DAY TRIAL // Constantly keeping your files defragmented translates into better system performance due to improved read/write speeds because the orderly files are no longer scattered all over the hard disk.
In less and less cases, this task is no longer a chore that needs to be remembered as most defraggers on the market today feature schedules that can make the entire operation fully automatic. In case you forget to run the application designed to place the files on the disk in order, a before set schedule intervenes and starts the job for you.
Despite the great improvements in this sense, there is also the downside that the defragmenter’s job may overlap with your work schedule, thus using the computer resources for the programmed task, putting your work second.
Ashampoo is well known on the software market, producing oodles of easy-to-use and functional programs, among which Magical Defrag utility, an instrument designed to keep your hard disks in perfect shape, defragmenting at the most convenient times, when the drives are not in use. This eliminates any sort of system resource deficiencies when you need them the most.
Just like in the case of all Ashampoo products, the interface of Magical Defrag is intuitive and extremely easy to use, automating the tasks as much as possible and leaving little input on the user side. This is actually the innovative part of the program that makes it stand out in the crowd.
Upon installation, you can select the screensaver that ships with the program and which shows the background defragmentation. This is optional, of course, as you can see all the activity of the software directly in the main application window with no problems.
In spite of the brief amount of options and automatic tasks Magical Defrag makes available, there is still tweaking you can do in order to make the application work your way, such as activating fragmentation protection feature or set new defragmentation tasks. Yes, even if the application has been constructed to perform defragmentation during system idle times, programming a job is still necessary. Otherwise, Magical Defrag will not enhance the performance of your hard disk(s) at all. That’s because a programmed task is run while the system is idle, so the entire process is not completed in a single run, but whenever you stop working on the computer.
Upon creating a new job, or when editing the default one, include the possibility of skipping files smaller or larger than a certain size or the new data. Moreover, the advanced defragmentation settings permit conditioning of the task according to CPU activity, I/O activity or high page. However, the developer took this a step forward by allowing you to set the defrag job to halt while your laptop is on battery mode, while printing, when a new process is started, or during mouse/keyboard activity.
Needless to say, the application can run the defragmentation tasks on a weekly, monthly or daily user-defined schedule. But its flexibility in options goes even further, providing the possibility of setting the screen saver as the trigger for the task, or eliminate any recurrence and customize the defrag action to start only when you call it (these options are available solely for user-created jobs, and not for the default one).
Ashampoo Magical Defrag 3 can perform an analysis of any of the drives on your computer and provide details on the volume (file system, size, cluster size, amount of used and free space). But the most important data supplied is fragmentation level, the number of fragmented files and the most fragmented data.
During our testing, the application proved to be extremely efficient while defragmenting, bringing all selected drives in tip top shape, at no expense in terms of system performance, as the entire process ran in the background during computer idle times.
Comparing Magical Defrag 3 to professional, more expensive, solutions on the market, the differences are simply in terms of the options provided to the user, as the defragmentation job done by Ashampoo’s product equals the efficiency of the higher end programs. The lack of a plethora of options and the limited number of features are mainly because of the default design for the home user, who just needs a simple way to keep all the files on the hard disk as scattered together as possible, at the most convenient time.
However, advanced users will be glad to see that the job configuration panel permits customizing the job to skip files of certain sizes, or tweak it to run whenever CPU, I/O and page file activity are between certain parameters. Although the application has been built to start defragging whenever you’re not doing any work, you still have the possibility to start the tasks manually and give up any Magical activity when the computer is in idle state. Note: The regular price of Ashampoo Magical Defrag is $15, but you can purchase the application with a 50% discount from Softpedia.
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