Both Windows XP and Vista come with built-in defragmenters. So why would anyone need a third-party defragger from a company other than Microsoft? We believe it all goes back to that adage - "you get what you pay for."

Let's look at Windows XP. We've addressed the general issue of fragmentation in a previous issue. In a nutshell, we defragment because we want our files put back together in one piece so we can access them faster - whether a photo, Word file, spread sheet, or whatever. Turns out the Windows XP built-in defragger begins and ends with that nutshell. But it's missing the rest of the nut, and all the other nuts in the bowl.

Here are just some of the things wrong with the built-in defragger:

Multi-pass defragmentation. The built-in defragger needs to run over and over to defragment all the data files on the drive.
It doesn't consolidate the free space on the drive. This leads to much faster refragmentation of the drive, assuming it ever gets completely defragmented in the first place, which is unlikely.
It needs 15-20% free space on a drive in order to work. That's basically telling you to buy a bunch of extra disk space just to let it work.
Inability to defragment really big drives with lots of fragmentation. If you're buying larger and larger drives to handle things like video editing, you'll likely run into trouble using the built-in defragger. It just wasn't designed to handle really large drives, especially if they are heavily fragmented.

There's a whole lot more, but those are just a few of the key ones.

With Vista, Microsoft made some changes to the built-in defragger, but it still doesn't have the full capabilities needed to completely defragment a drive. Furthermore, there is no longer a progress screen with the Vista built-in defragger, so you can't even tell what's going on with the defrag process.

If you want the best possible performance on your computer, you owe it to yourself to at least check out an alternative to the built-in defraggers provided in Windows. If you take a close look, you'll see that paying just a little will likely give you a whole lot of improved performance on your PC or laptop investment.