Go out and buy a new PC with the exact same specifications as your current PC and you’ll immediately notice that Windows boots swiftly, applications launch rapidly and your system just seems more responsive. This isn’t anything to do with the hardware components, as most people seem to believe, it’s more to do with the clean version of Windows that’s install on the system.

Use any PC over a period of a year and you’ll be constantly writing files to and from the hard drive. Installing and uninstalling applications, moving files around the drive and much more. Snag is, the more you do this, the more likely your drives will become fragmented. Fragmentation means that files and their data are stored in an unconventional manner, requiring your drive to spend longer searching for and loading the information.

The answer is defragmentation software that will examine your drive, re-arrange the contents so that they are located in a more streamline and systematic order. Uniblue DiskRescue 2009 is such software.

The first thing we encountered was the name - DiskRescue will confuse a few users as it gives the impression it will rescue and/or restore drive content after a system crash or similar issues. By ‘disk rescue’ the developers are attempting to convey that you can bring back your drive to full health be defragmenting the contents. Fragmentation has little to do with drive health, although a very fragmented drive may reduce the lifespan of your drive due to extended use.

Uniblue DiskRescue 2009 - like all Uniblue software - is very well designed. You simply open the tool, select the drive you want to analyse and perform the scan. You can then choose to defragment. You can also schedule a defragmentation process, say overnight, whilst you are away from your computer.

However, sadly defragmentation software has moved on from leaving your drive to defragment whilst you do something more interesting. This has been left to very capable freeware such as Auslogics Disk Defrag or Defraggler. Rival commercial defrag tools such as O &O Defrag and Diskeeper will use a pro-active approach to disk defragmentation, residing in the background, defragmenting your drive on-the-fly, generally when CPU use is low. Whereas you’d need to schedule DiskRescue to defragment when you’re not using your PC, the other two commercial tools will auto-sense CPU usage; say when you’re on the phone or leave to go for a quick meeting. Even the free IObit SmartDefrag has a basic facility to leave running in the background and for it to auto-fix fragmentation issues.