Official Product Name: Gparted
Version # Previewed: 0.3.3/0.3.4
Publisher: Bart Hakvoort
Developer and URL: Bart Hakvoort, gparted.sourceforge.net
ETA: Q4 2008
Why should you care: There’s no better and cheaper way to manage drive partitions.

You’ve heard the expression (or variation thereof), “Chose two: cheap, good, easy.” In the world of disk partitioning software, this expression has been as true as anywhere else, until now. GParted, unlike almost all competing products, is indeed cheap (well, free), good, and easy. Unlike a Web browser or word processor, you probably don’t need such software on a daily basis, but for those occasions when you do, Gparted will seem like a special delivery from heaven.

You’re probably used to DOS’s fdisk or Window’s Disk Management tool, and while they aren’t bad tools, they have one huge limitation: They can’t resize existing partitions nondestructively. In other words, to resize a partition, you’d first have to move your data (better hope it isn’t your boot partition), delete the partition, create a new one in the size you want, format it, and move your data back. With Gparted, you simply right-click the partition with the mouse, choose Resize, and just drag the partition’s edges to the partition size you want, and it takes care of the rest. This functionality has been around in commercial products such as Partition Magic and Acronis Disk Director, and Windows Vista’s own partition tool can do this too, but Gparted is pretty much the only free option that doesn’t require a whole new operating system.

Well, that’s actually not entirely true. Gparted is already installed on most Gnome-based Linux distributions, and the self-booting Gparted CD and USB-stick versions (hence the two version numbers) are also Linux-based, meaning that you’re running Linux when you’re running Gparted. But this means you can alter the boot partition without problems.

Though a Beta version, Gparted runs stably and smoothly. And though there’s no floppy-diskette version as there is with the competition, when was the last time your computer even had a floppy drive?

IObit SmartDefrag Beta 3 RC

Official Product Name: SmartDefrag
Version # Previewed: Beta 3 RC
Publisher: IObit
Developer and URL: IObit, www.iobit.com
ETA: Q3 2007
Why should you care: A faster and flexible defragger should always be in your utility bag.

There was a time when we were told that “NTFS doesn’t fragment like FAT32,” and while most of us interpreted that to mean “NTFS doesn’t fragment,” experience shows that it really means “NTFS fragments in a different way than FAT32.” The fact that XP includes a built-in defragmenter should have tipped us off, and before long its industrial-strength cousin, Diskeeper Pro, was available for automatic disk optimizations, but it wasn’t cheap. Enter SmartDegrag from IObit.

SmartDefrag is a freeware background disk optimizer. Like Diskeeper, it constantly monitors disk fragmentation levels and CPU use levels. When fragmentation reaches a certain level, and a long period of CPU idleness is detected, it springs into action and defragments your hard drive in the background. If your CPU usage doesn't pass a certain level, it continues to work in the background while you work in the foreground, and when it detects heavy CPU usage, it suspends the optimization process. These “certain levels” I continually mention are user-configurable, but I found the default settings to be perfectly sensible for a modern computer.

There's also a built-in scheduler so as to allow weekly defrags at night (for example) and a foreground optimizer that works much faster than the built-in optimizer, but don’t plan on doing any work while the optimizer is doing its job.

A reasonably fair question to ask is, “If this is so great, then why is it free?” Well, like Google Mail, SmartDefrag constantly displays a column of text-based advertisements along the right side of its window. I suppose this ad space could be purchased by other advertisers, but for now, it’s only used to advertise other IObit software, all of which is commercial, and certainly worth considering based on the quality of IObit’s free offering.

by Warren Ernst