To keep your hard drive operating smoothly, there’s nothing more important than defragmenting it. Daily use of your PC means that your hard drive becomes disorganised, which leads to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow start-ups and shutdowns and sometimes system failures. Auslogics Disk Defrag is basically a better looking version of Windows own defrag tool but does it do the job any better?

Auslogics Disk Defrag supports FAT 16, FAT 32 and NTFS volumes, which basically means it will work on almost any PC hard drive. What you instantly notice with this program is its simplicity. The big difference between Auslogics Disk Defrag and the built-in Windows equivalent is speed. Most users report that Auslogics Disk Defrag can defragment a hard drive in around half the time that Windows can. This is really important because one of the reasons Windows users give up on the inbuilt defrag tool is the increasing amount of time it takes to defrag the PC as it gets older. As a rough guide Auslogics Disk Defrag can defrag a full 75GB drive in around 2 hours, which is pretty impressive.

Another plus is that it’s pretty light on system resources - you can have it running in the background and it won’t hog your CPU although for best results, we don’t advise trying to use your computer whilst running a defrag tool. We found the program to be very stable too, with no major crashes or freezes during the defrag process. However, some users report that it has crashed programs that are running at the same time while using vb6 runtime files or .net framework.

On the downside, the program does not offer much in the way of advanced features. For example, you can’t set it to automatically shut-down your PC when it’s finished (useful if you leave it on overnight) and you can’t instruct it to exclude or ignore certain files or folders.

Our overall impression of Auslogics Disk Defrag is that it offers significant speed advantages over Windows defrag tool with a slightly nicer interface. If you’re tired of hanging around waiting for your drive to defrag, give this a go and you might be impressed by the results.