"How To Keep Your Computer Systems Running Smoothly - Part 2"

Complete Transcript of
Marcus Galindo – Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
Host Alan Ashendorf
May 03 2008

Alan:  Today on Let’s Talk Computers, we are continuing our conversation – talking about tips and techniques to keep your computer system running smoothly. Our guest today is Marcus Galindo, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Marcus.

Marcus:  Thank you for having me, Alan.

Alan:  Marcus, the last we talked about how important it was to always make sure that you have patches for all your running programs, and especially any patches for the Microsoft Operating System.

And we also talked about how important it is to always have periodic backups, because we never know when our computer system will fail. But one way to make it easier to have periodic backups is to have multiple hard drives in your system.

You can put another internal hard drive in, so now you can back up C: to D: or D: to C: to make sure that you always have a good back up. And if you can’t put an internal hard drive in your system, you can always go with an external hard drive. But, making sure that you have good, reliable backups - that is so important, isn’t it?

Marcus:  When we talk about backups, a second hard drive is really the best option. It allows you to do those backups back and forth. You can back up only your files or you can back up the entire drive.

Alan:  And we load our computer systems down. We get a computer system that may have had like an 80 GIG drive in it and the first thing we do is we open the case up and we put a new hard drive in, which is a 750 GIG drive. While we’re at it, why don’t we add 2? They are not that expensive anymore. They’re probably less expensive than they have ever been, but now we may be overtaxing the whole computer system and we didn’t upgrade one of the critical components – like a power supply!

Marcus:  Any time you’re looking at adding hardware, you want to take a look at your power supply; you want to take a look at whether or not your system can handle it. For example, some motherboards may not be able to support additional hard drives or additional memory or certain other things. So, it’s important to take a look at your hardware before you go out to buy any new equipment.

Alan:  For instance if you go out and buy a new video card, well the new video cards are great. But some of them actually have a large fan on them, because they run so fast and so powerfully that they also run very hot. It also takes more power to drive these new video cards. You need to make sure that your power supply is capable of providing all the current for it. If not, go out and buy a power supply. They are not that expensive any more, and most of them are universal and they fit in all cases.

Marcus:  It’s very true. A lot of times you may just be looking at a simple power supply or maybe even switching out a case or something like that. But, again, it’s just really important to take a look at what you have and what you are going to need when planning any time of upgrade.

Some cases might not support 3 additional hard drives, but certainly, some do. And of course, there is always the advent of the external hard drive, which you can also buy and are also just as cheap, nowadays.

Alan:  One of the things that a lot of people don’t think about is protecting their computer system with what they call a "UPS," or an uninterruptible power supply, because computer systems will go down quite quickly when the power goes off and if it’s in a state of writing to your hard drive, you can do a lot damage as far as writing files to the wrong place on the hard drive and therefore, the computer won’t be bootable, anymore.

Marcus:  Uninterruptible power supplies are one of the most important ingredients for a computer system that has anything of value on it – because what can happen is if you are doing any type of disk writing or writing processes, when the power goes out, you can have a serious problem.

What the UPS does is that it allows for a window of time in which you can shut the computer down. You can even configure software that will do it, automatically, but does it in a safe way, so that no data is destroyed and you can have a well-running computer once your power comes back on.

Alan:  Or as an alternative to installing extra hard drives in your computer system, you can buy an appliance called the Microsoft Windows Home Server that will back up all of your files on all of your computer systems, automatically.

Marcus:  Windows Home Server was really brought into the consumer marketplace and something that is really needed – which is the ability to have centralized management of their files, as well as those backups that you are talking about.

And in using Windows Home Server people can manage their anti-virus programs; they can manage defragmentation; they can manage all these different types of operations across their home network.

Alan:  And it makes it so easy if you have multiple computers, say in a household – or even for a small business. It basically becomes the central file storage location where everybody can share from that one server, without having to have all the server software that you normally had to install.

Marcus:  Prior to Windows Home Server, it was actually pretty complicated for most people to set up their home networks in order to share files in an efficient way. You also didn’t have centralized storage, so if one computer was off and you needed to get a file from that computer, you had to boot that computer up in order to be able to get that file. With Windows Home Server, there is true centralized management of files and folders.

Alan:  With that centralized storage, that means more people are saving files onto the server and that’s where Diskeeper really will help out, because now you have a Version of Diskeeper for the Windows Home Server.

Marcus:  We do. There’s a version of Diskeeper, specifically designed for Windows Home Server. It actually works as a plug-in. It’s an add-on in the Management Console and it allows the home server to stay defragmented.

That’s really important because as people are storing more and more files in the centralized locations and they are making edits to those files and they are making them larger and smaller, there will be more and more fragmentation build-up. As fragmentation builds up the server can slow down, actually. So, it’s important to keep them defragmented.

Alan:  And it’s important to do this automatically, without having user intervention.

Marcus:  What we incorporated in our latest versions of Diskeeper is technology that we call InvisiTasking. This allows defragmentation to occur, automatically in the background, but only using idle system resources. What that means is that now there is no impact of defragmentation to the user. Everybody has had that experience where they have clicked on "defragment," and 5 hours later they come back and it is still running.

Well, that is not something that we want people to experience. It was important for us when we developed this technology that it was something that wouldn’t impact a user’s performance and really just let them use their computers, without even having to think about defragmentation.

Alan:  Most people bought their computer to do computing. They didn’t buy one to do a defragment program. They wanted to be able to use their computer for word processing, for spreadsheets, for databases, and especially to surf the Internet. And they don’t want to even have to think about doing any kind of maintenance.

Marcus:  Computers were meant to be used. Nobody wants to sit there for endless hours doing defragmentation jobs, doing disk backups, running anti-virus scans when they can’t use their computer. It’s just not practical.

That’s why it’s important as technology moves forward that we have programs that work in the background, automatically – without affecting user’s performance. It’s something that they don’t even notice. And I think we are going to be seeing more and more of that in anti-virus software, [and] in backup software, so that users can actually use their computer.

Alan:  With your InvisiTasking, you only work at idle conditions, which means that I’m not doing anything on my computer – it’s going to go out automatically and clean up my disk for me so that when I go back to do work then it turns itself off.

Marcus:  InvisiTasking monitors a lot of different factors on the computer in order to determine its use when there are resources available, when you are staring at the screen, when you have taken a short break or maybe you went and cooked dinner. It’s going to take that opportunity to defragment.

Alan:  And I know that Diskeeper works great with XP, because we’ve been using it for years; but what about all the different flavors of Vista? It gets very confusing as to what flavor you have and what software will actually run on it.

Marcus:  Well, Diskeeper is designed to work on all versions of Vista, all the way from your Home all the way up to Vista Ultimate. Microsoft just released their Server 2008, which we have a compatible version for.

Alan:  When installing Diskeeper on our computer, whether it’s XP or Vista, we used to set it up so it had certain scheduled times to run. Can we still do that if we want to just schedule in the middle of the night?

Marcus:  If you would like to schedule defragmentation to happen at a certain time, you can certainly do that - although, with our InvisiTasking Technology, it’s really not necessary, because you are never going to notice the defragmentation job as it’s running in the background.

Alan:  Some people like myself, like to see under the hood and I want to see some kind of graphs or some kind of reports that says, "Oh, this is what is really going on, they’re actually moving the files around." Is that possible with the new Diskeeper 2008?

Marcus:  From our Management Console, you can take a look at all the pretty colored blocks, moving to show what is happening on the defragmentation job, and once it’s done, you will get a full report on what was improved, how many fragments were removed, and a myriad of different factors.

Alan:  It’s amazing to see the “before,” and “after,” when you run Diskeeper on a large hard drive. If you use your computer just for doing normal everyday things it does get all "fragged up," and when you run Diskeeper and you can see the before and after. It is amazing to see how much actual disk space that you have recovered and how the speed difference in the before and after. It makes a lot of difference.

Marcus:  A lot of people really don’t understand how much fragmentation is affecting their systems. Doing a defrag on your computer is kind of like restoring it to new, because you’re going to get those same speeds or even better that you saw when you pulled that computer right out of its box.

Alan:  A lot of people really don’t understand what actually is going on behind the scenes – why computers start getting slower and slower – and then they make the mistake of thinking, "Oh, I need more memory," or they make the really major mistake and go out and they buy more hard disk space, thinking that that will solve the problem of the computer’s slowing down. That may just compound the problem.

Marcus:  As we get into larger and larger hard drives, they want to use what space they have. So, they are still filling these 750 Gigabyte hard drives, whether it’s with movies, or music or files or those temporary files that we were talking about before. Those drives get filled up and as fragmentation continues to build and the drive gets larger and larger, it’s going to take longer and longer in order to do even simple processes.

Alan:  Well, nowadays you can hold a Terabyte hard drive in your hand and the cost of hard drives have come way, way down so people put massive hard drives, even multiple massive hard drives in their computer system and they fill up quite quickly, too!

Marcus:  File sizes are getting larger and larger today. Even your standard text documents or your standard spreadsheets are getting larger and larger because of all the fonts and all the different colors and all the different editions that are going into them.

Alan:  And as a side benefit, by having your system organized in such a way that the file can be read very quickly with minimum disk accesses, your hard drive is going to last a lot longer, because it’s not being used as much. And hard drives, even though they have come down in cost, they still cost the average person money.

Marcus:  Hard drives are the last really mechanical piece of the computer system, aside from the fan. Hard drives are doing a lot of physical work and that’s the read head moving back and forth across the platter in order to access data. Hard drives have to do that millions and millions of times a day in order to read all that data. So, it’s important to minimize the amount of work that your hard drive is doing in order to keep it running and lasting longer.

Alan:  I’m going to get the ability to have my computer system organized, automatically in the background by using a Product like Diskeeper, and it’s kind of like peace of mind. What are we looking at as far as the price for this peace of mind? What does it cost for the new Diskeeper?

Marcus:  For a simple home user, we have Diskeeper starting at $29.95, but for the power users, they really want to use our Pro Premier Edition, which includes some features that are really going to be beneficial to them. That runs $99.95.

Alan:  For Diskeeper 2008, do we have Trial Versions that we can try before we buy? Are these stripped down in any way?

Marcus:  We have full Trial Versions available on our Website at www.diskeeper.com. These are full, 30-day Trial Versions, where you can test out all the features and all the benefits and really see what Diskeeper can do for you.

Alan:  Marcus, as always, it’s been our pleasure to have you as our guest here at Let’s Talk Computer, talking about how we can keep our computer systems running as smoothly as possible. We look forward to having you back on the air again, real soon.

Marcus:  Thank you, Alan.