Showing posts with label Windows defrag. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Windows defrag. Show all posts

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Are you looking for an alternative program or website?

If you are then alternativeTo.net is the place for you. I'm not sure how I found this site but it has become one of my favorites. Recently I needed to find a better de-fragmentation program for my son's computer. He had almost filled the 120GB hard drive with games and there was only 20% of the drive space free, and that was very fragmented. I fired up the program that comes with Windows XP called "disk defragmenter" and had it start working on the drive. After a short time the program came back with a message telling me that it couldn't finish the job and that most of the drive was still fragmented.

This was unacceptable to me so I decided to see what else was out the that could help me fix this problem, that's when I turned to alternativeTo.net. I typed in "disk defragmenter" and it gave me a list of programs that it thought were a match. I looked down the list and I could see numbers next to programs that people had voted for. It uses like buttons like the ones in Facebook. There were some interesting tools listed and I spotted  Auslogics Disk Defrag with 78 likes. I had used this program before, and it had worked reasonably well for me but I was hoping to find something different. I clicked on Auslogics Disk Defrag and alternativeTo gave me a list of alternative programs to Auslogics Disk Defrag. On this new list was Defraggler with 308 likes, and under the name was a link to the website, so I gave it a click and it brought me to Piriform's website. I had used some of their other free software in the past so I knew this was a good choice to try.

Defraggler took a few hours to clean up the hard drive mess on my son's computer and it did a great job. I think it would have taken me longer to find this program if I hadn't used alternativTo, and with the instant feedback using "likes" I was able to make a quick judgment as to whether or not I wanted to try it. It didn't give me the alternative I wanted on the first click but on the second it did. I have to give alternativeTo a big thumbs up as well as Defraggler for helping me to solve my problem.