FAST Defrag, what does it do?

What does FAST defrag do? Was expecting it to be like the windows defrag, only faster, but in installing it and bringing it up I do not see an option to defrag the drives. There is a Clean button, and it appears to do things to the memory. Does anyone know what it actually does?

Thanks,

Marvin

 

FAST Defrag Standard 2.03.00SP3
Freeware (Page 1/1) By: Jim Losi
12.04.03


Memory management is something some of us have to deal with on a daily basis. Not all of us have PC’s with loads of RAM installed and not everyone’s work PC is a beast either. Trying to multitask on a machine with only 384Megabytes of RAM can be frustrating at times especially with having 5 or 6 applications loaded such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Access etc, that use alot of RAM, quickly becomes an issue. The issue is typically unresolved when applications are closed. Some data is cached in RAM for later use which takes a while for the operating system to release and some programs just leak memory which can cause crashes. It can get ugly real quick on a low end machine, but if it’s all you have to work with then there’s only one thing to do… manage the RAM!
FAST Defrag can definitely help you in this area.

Install was quick and easy. It asks the standard install questions for install location and icon placements. Uninstall was painless.

FAST Defrag can monitor your RAM in the background and can sit in your systray if you desire. It will work to free your RAM while you work in your applications or, if you need RAM now simply right click on the systray icon or maximize FAST Defrag and hit the "clean" button and it will crank away to release all the RAM held in limbo. But be cautioned that the cleaning engine is not discretionary when you use the clean button. It will free RAM but programs may re-load components back into memory again. The application best works idle in the systray so it can release only what is necessary.

FAST Defrag has several options to play with that can help maximize your system RAM. One thing to note is that it has 2 engines, the AMF and SMF. The engines do the SAME thing using a different algorithm, though the AMF engine is faster. The defragging process takes seconds if you force the clean, otherwise it just sits idle and uses almost no CPU cycles at all. The other options allow you to enable the memory guardian while idle, and set "conservative swap file usage" which doesn’t affect NT based PC’s.

FAST Defrag does the job, and when used properly can help you alleviate your system performance issues.

(5/5) Stars

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=2475

 

Don't even go near it.

Memory can NOT be fragmented, and it is architecturally impossilbe to unfragment it.

And, wow, it frees up ram. Just what every PC user should have. A PC with free ram, that is not being used by anything and is thus Wasted!!

If you have one of these snake oil programs installed, dump it.

 

Snake Oil is a perfect description of these types of programmes. Tread warily regarding these. Even better don't bother installing them. Even if these programmes do free up RAM, the resources used to have them running can quickly zap most of any improvement they claim to make.

They are about a usefull as those dialup/internet speed up programmes.

 

The whole point, which is why they are snake oil, is that there is no need to ever have free ram.
And, it is not THESE programs that create it. All they do is force Windows to do it, which is what window will do, when and if it needs to.

But, they are great programs if you want to exercise your disk drive and your swap file.

 

The link is http://www.amsn.ro/index.php. It has a FAQ page, etc. You have some interesting responses, but does it defrag?

Thanks,

 

Well, it claims to. But it can't.
The thing it "thinks" it is defragging is memory (ram) not disk.

So, here is a designer who thinks that areas in ram work the same as areas on disk. And, if it's good to have disk defragged, then it must be good to have ram defragged.

But, they don't work the same. Even if it did, defragging would make not an iota of difference (there are very few read/write heads on a ram chip and not much latency, since they don't spin, etc etc).

And, at the end of the day, it is architecturally impossible to defrag ram. (even if it did serve a purpose)

 

Thanks, that is what I suspected.