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Ever notice how much more sprightly your computers are after you've reformatted the drive and reinstalled software? That's because the file fragmentation that occurs when you open, change and resave data files eventually slows the system down. And that effect can be especially noticeable on heavily used data and application servers.
Problem is that although defragmentation programs have been bundled into Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 95/98 - as well as being available in a variety of third-party applications - Windows NT offers no built-in disk optimizer. And if you wanted to optimize an NT server, the only option available was Executive Software International Inc.'s Diskeeper. Now, Diskeeper has some competition from Symantec Corp.'s Norton Speed Disk 5.0. For the first time, the tried-and-true Norton product offers NT defragmentation and disk optimization in workstation and server versions. The two companies have taken divergent approaches to NT defragmentation and optimization. NT's application programming interface for defragmentation was built by Executive Software, and it enables the company and other third-party software companies to hook defragmenters into the operating system for services. According to Exec. utive Software, that's the only truly safe and Microsoftapproved way to do the job.
Norton Speed Disk, however, appears to sidestep the...