Myth No. 3: When your computer gets unbearably slow, it's time to replace it.

The number one reason for performance bottlenecks is fragmentation. Even the hottest, best hardware will eventually slow down when fragmentation is left unchecked. The disk drive is by far the slowest of the three main components of your computer: CPU, memory and disk. Because fragmentation dramatically increases the time needed to read disk files, booting up your computer, launching applications and opening files takes longer and longer until one day you get fed up and decide to replace the machine with a new one. That is, unless you know that fragmentation is the true cause, in which case you can install Diskeeper and restore the computer to peak performance on the spot. Remember what it was like when that computer was brand new? That's what Diskeeper can do for you.

To illustrate the point, we did a little experiment. We turned off automatic defragmentation on a desktop computer (2.4GHz) on Friday, and when we came in on Monday, we did the usual start-of-week actions. One of the things we do is to run a program that hunts down and removes spyware from our systems. On Monday, when we came in, we timed how long it took to deep-scan the system. It took 56 seconds. For purposes of the experiment, we didn't have it remove any spyware after this scan. We then defragmented the boot volume, and re-ran the deep-scan. This time it took 35 seconds. That's a 40% reduction in elapsed time!

The same applies to any program that uses the hard drive, such as an anti-virus program. Take a look at this graph:

Yes, it can take HOURS to run an antivirus scan on a volume with tens of thousands of files! All that time is lost production time. When it gets bad enough, it can make you want to replace the machine. Well, you don't have to replace it! Eliminate the problem by keeping your computer automatically defragmented with Diskeeper. Don't replace that computer; defrag it with Diskeeper.