• A brand new user interface
• Improved performance
• StealthPatrol automatic disk defragmentation.
• Enhancements to Single File Defrag
• New and Improved Reports
• Enhanced Functionality for the tray icon
• Native support for 64-bit platforms
• Enhanced Active Directory integration
• Support for Exchange 2007
• Support for Windows Server 2008
• New PerfectDisk for VMware
• New Space Explorer
• Enhanced installation and upgrade procedures

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Workstation and Server
• Windows XP
• Microsoft 2003 Server
• Microsoft Vista and Vista SP1 beta
• Microsoft Windows Home Server
• Microsoft 2008 Server beta
• Terminal Server (Windows 2003/2000/2008 based) x86 and x64
• MS Cluster Servers (Windows 2003/2000/2008 based) x86 and x64
• All levels of RAID
• FAT16, FAT32, NTFS and exFAT drives are supported

64MB of memory is the minimum recommended with 128MB of memory suggested.

PerfectDisk 2008 cannot be used to manage/schedule earlier versions of PerfectDisk.

When you upgrade from PerfectDisk 8.0 to PerfectDisk 2008, any existing schedules and configurations will automatically be imported into PerfectDisk 2008.

There is no need to uninstall the demo. After purchasing PerfectDisk 2008, you can enter your product key by selecting the Enter Product Key option under the Product Resources tab.

• Remote Deployment using the PerfectDisk Command Center.
• PerfectDisk provides an Active Directory tab with Active Directory Group Policy deployment instructions.
• Remote Deployment Using Active Directory Group Policy
  Please see How to Deploy Software to a Specific Group By Using a Group Policy (Q302430) for further information on how to deploy software using Active Directory Group Policy. The PerfectDisk Help file also contains information on how to create a software deployment package as well as information on how to deploy via Active Directory Group Policy.
• Remote Deployment Using Microsoft Windows Installer
  Please see Windows Installer: Benefits and Implementation for System Administrators for more information about deploying applications using Microsoft Windows Installer.
• Remote Deployment Using Systems Management Server (SMS)
  PerfectDisk can be remotely deployed using Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS). Please see Deploying Windows Installer Setup Packages with Systems Management Server for detailed information on how to deploy software packages using SMS.
• Integration with 3rd Party Installation Software
  PerfectDisk can be remotely deployed by most 3rd party deployment software through the PerfectDisk command line installation interface. Please see Use Windows Installer from the command line for more information on how install to PerfectDisk using the command line.

Please contact Raxco Technical Support for assistance in using the PerfectDisk Command Center, Active Directory Group Policy or other software to deploy PerfectDisk across your network.

• Version of Windows that the host system is running.
• Version of Windows that your virtual guests are running.

If your host system is running a server version of Windows OR any of your virtual guests are running a server version of Windows, then you will need to purchase a PerfectDisk 2008 Server license. You can install PerfectDisk 2008 Server on the Windows host as well as all of that host's virtual guests.

For VMware Workstation, Raxco offers PerfectDisk for VMware - which defragments VMware's virtual drives with PerfectDisk's patented SMARTPlacement optimization technology and uses the VMware Mount and Shrink utilities to automatically defragment and reclaim space. The physical (host) machine's drives are also automatically defragmented and optimized.

For VMware ESX, Raxco offers the PerfectDisk 2008 for VMware ESX Bundle - which combines the power of PerfectDisk 2008 Server and the PerfectDisk 2008 Command Center with your VMware ESX Server environment to help you automatically boost VMware ESX Server performance on Windows-based virtual machines.

When VSS is enabled on a drive, VSS may detect defrag activity as changes to the drive and attempt to replicate those changes (MS KB article 312067) .  Depending on the amount of data that VSS attempts to replicate, Shadow Copies/Restore Points may be purged or "dropped".  This means that previous versions of files may no longer be available or Restore Points may be purged.

If a VSS enabled drive has been formatted with a cluster size of 16K or larger (default cluster size is 4k), VSS has the ability to detect defragmentation activity and minimize replication - reducing (but possibly not eliminating) the number of Shadow Copies/Restore Points that may be purged. 

PerfectDisk can be configured to detect if VSS is enabled on a drive and to take appropriate action.  By default, if VSS is configured on a drive and the cluster size is less than 16k, then PerfectDisk will defragment in VSS compatible mode.  If VSS is configured on a drive and the cluster size is less than 16k then PerfectDisk can also be configured to not defragment the VSS enabled drive at all or to defragment the VSS enabled drive normally.

If PerfectDisk is configured to Stop if any Shadow Copies exist, PerfectDisk will NOT defragment the drive at all.

If PerfectDisk is configured to Perform normal defragmentation, it may result in Shadow Copies/Restore Points being purged as defragmentation is performed.

When configured to defragment in VSS compatible mode and the drive cluster size is less than 16k, PerfectDisk will limit the number of files "moved" during the defragmentation pass so that purging of Shadow Copies/Restore Points is minimized.  For VSS enabled drives where the cluster size is 16K or larger, PerfectDisk will defragment drives normally.

Note that when PerfectDisk defragments a drive in VSS compatibility mode it may not defragment files/free space as completely as it normally does.

    * PD91Engine compares the current date with the last AutoUpdate timestamp date and if more than 7 days difference, then AutoUpdate will check for updates and reset the timestamp.

You can customize the frequency that AutoUpdate looks for updates - specifying the day of the week to check, time to check and the frequency to check (every week, every other week, etc.) by clicking on Configuration/Advanced Configuration and then clicking on the AutoUpdate tab.

Please note that if the internet connection is a dial-up connection, AutoUpdate will NOT initiate the dial-up connection.

By default, the automatic defrag will not run on the drive if the drive was last optimized within the last 5 days. You can change the number of days to wait between Automatic defrag passes, set the number of minutes that Windows is idle before beginning to optimize the drive and specify a list of applications to check to see if running prior to optimizing the drive. If any of the specified applications are running, the automatic defragmentation will NOT take place.

To configure a StealthPatrol schedule, go to the AutoPilot schedule tab and select the StealthPatrol Option

 Even though these devices represent themselves as a fixed hard drive, they may not support defragmentation. Prior to defragmenting these devices, you'll need to check with the USB/Firewire/external device manufacturer and verify that defragmentation is supported on these devices.

If your USB/Firewire/external drive does support defragmentation then you can enable USB support in PerfectDisk 2008 by going to the PerfectDisk settings tab, removable storage and select the option to allow optimization of USB and firewire connected drives and click ok. For Flash drives, check the option to allow defragmenting flash drives. The USB/Firewire/external should display once this option is enabled.

Before you connect to a remote computer, the following conditions need to be met:

• 1. Windows or other firewall is preconfigured to allow the PerfectDisk Agent (PD91Agent.exe).
• 2. The remote computer is on the network.
• 3. You must have Administrator rights on the remote computer.
• 4. The remote computer to which you are connecting must have PerfectDisk installed.

Open PerfectDisk. Click the 2008 button in the left corner.

Choose the Connect to Another Computer option from the Menu. This launches the network browser that lets you connect to a remote computer on the network.

Enter the User name, Domain name, Password and type the Computer name you wish to connect to in the format of [\\computer name], or browse the network tree. You can also enter the user name in the format of <username@domain.com>. Instead of typing the domain and user name separately, you can type the user name with domain name. Once you enter the address, the Domain field will populate and the @domain.com will be removed from the user name.

If you would like to connect as the user that you are logged in with then select the Current User option.

Click Connect. If the connection is successful, PerfectDisk connects to the selected computer. Otherwise, it displays an error message.

Note: When you are connected to a remote computer and you want to connect back to your local machine then click the Connect to Local Computer button on the Connect to Computer window.

To defragment selected files:

Make sure the Defragmentation tab is selected in the Tab Bar.

From the Available Drive List, select a drive from where you want to select the files for defragmentation.

Click the Selected Files option from the Tool Bar, or right-click a drive and choose Selected Files.

Browse for the files that need to be defragmented. The files that are fragmented will be enabled and will show the number of fragments they have.

Select the file in the left pane of the browser and then click the Add-> button to move the file to right pane. Add as many fragmented files for defragmentation.

After selecting the files, click the Defragment button. The defragmentation process will start and once it is complete, a summary of the defrag will appear under the Statistics tab.

While you may close all open applications and think your computer isn't busy, background disk activity and processes (i.e. Windows Services) may be using sufficient resources that StealthPatrol will not run.

The default thresholds should allow StealthPatrol to run on most desktops/laptops used for general tasks such as email and internet browsing. If your system is used for more cpu/disk intensive operations (gaming, video/graphics, programming) and you want StealthPatrol to defragment, you may need to increase StealthPatrol's cpu and disk thresholds.

You can change the thresholds that StealthPatrol uses to determine if your computer is "idle" by download/running one of the following:

• For desktop/laptops - stealthpatrolsettings_ws.exe
• For servers - stealthpatrolsettings_svr.exe

This will create 3 registry keys on your computer located in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Raxco\PerfectDisk\9.0.

The registry keys created are:

• KernelTimeThreshold
• UserTimeThreshold
• IoThreshold

For StealthPatrol for servers, the CPU thresholds are doubled (20% for each) and Disk Bytes/sec is increased to 20,000,000.

If increasing these settings does not allow StealthPatrol to run, you can modify AT YOUR OWN RISK to find settings that will allow StealthPatrol to run on your computer.

If you want to guarantee that PerfectDisk runs on your computer, you may wish to schedule PerfectDisk to run at a specific time. You can always configure PerfectDisk to run at a low CPU priority and to monitor and throttle Disk I/O to impose the least impact on system resources. You can also set a maximum duration on scheduled defrag passes to ensure that PerfectDisk only runs for a set duration.

Monitoring system resource usage to determine StealthPatrol thresholds

1. Run Windows Performance Monitor
2. Click the X button to remove any counters currently being monitored
3. Click the + button to add counters
4. Select Processes from Performance Object
5. Verify that Select instances from list radio button is selected
6. Verify that _Total is selected from the list of available processes
7. Verify that Select counters from list radio button is selected
8. Select I/O Read Bytes/sec and click the Add button
9. Select I/O Write Bytes/sec and click the Add button
10. Select I/O Other Bytes/sec and click the Add button
11. Select Processor from Performance Object
12. Select %User Time and click the Add button
13. Select %Privileged Time and click the Add button
14. Performance monitor will start displaying real-time information regarding these counters
15. Click the View Report button
16. Add the I/O Read, Write and Other Bytes/sec to derive a total for disk usage
17. Determine the StealthPatrol cpu/disk thresholds that you would like to use based on the above values

• PerfectDisk will only display drives which are formatted NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, and ExFat
• PerfectDisk will only display drives that Computer Management/Disk Management sees as being locally attached
• The System Account must have READ permission on the drive in order to be visible to PerfectDisk. This preserves the Windows security model. Check the System Account permissions from Disk Administrator -> Partition Properties -> Security -> Permissions.

Please note that PerfectDisk does NOT address internal fragmentation of databases. Please contact your database software vendor for tools to manage internal database fragmentation.

• The System Account doesn't have READ permission on the drive. Check the System Account permissions from Disk Administrator -> Partition Properties -> Security -> Permissions.
• A removable/external drive has been removed from your computer. Close PerfectDisk and re-run.

The PerfectDisk Services - PD91Agent and PD91Engine need to be configured to the default startup mode (PD91Agent - Automatic, PD91Engine, Manual) in order for all features of PerfectDisk to run correctly. Disabling these services will result in PerfectDisk not running. Changing the startup mode from Automatic to Manual may result in certain PerfectDisk features not working correctly.

Please also see PerfectDisk Tips and Tricks.

Please note that since each system has its OWN system disk and registry, an application would have to be installed and licensed twice; once on the primary server, and then on the secondary server.

What does this mean for PerfectDisk? It depends:

If you wanted PerfectDisk to be able to run on the secondary if the primary was unavailable, then PerfectDisk would need to be installed AND licensed on the secondary server. The secondary server would have it's own defrag profiles, etc...

If you want to be able to do an boottime defrag on a SHARED disk, then BOTH systems will have to be shut down or the cluster would need to be temporarily "broken". Otherwise, when you reboot System A, then System B will detect that System A is down and will take over the SHARED disk drives - System A will not be able to see them when it reboots.

As a Microsoft Certified defragmenter, PerfectDisk's use of Microsoft's defrag APIs ensures that defragmentation takes place in a safe and Microsoft supported manner.

According to Michael Yang, flash marketing manager at Samsung

"There are also concerns about wear. That is, flash has the potential to wear out after tens (or hundreds) of thousands of write cycles.

This characterization, however, is too simplistic. A flash device that is rated at 100,000 write cycles, for example, can write 100,000 times to every single (memory) cell within the device. In other words, the device doesn't write to the same cell over and over again but spreads out the writes over many different cells. This is achieved through wear leveling which is carried out by the SSD's controller.

This would make it virtually impossible to wear out a flash chip. A pattern could be perpetually repeated in which a 64GB SSD is completely filled with data, erased, filled again, then erased again every hour of every day for years, and the user still wouldn't reach the theoretical write limit."

When you run the web-download installation of PerfectDisk 2008, it extracts the installation package contents into the Program Files\Raxco\PerfectDisk2008Install folder and then starts the installation process. During installation, msxml6.dll is only installed into Program Files\Raxco\PerfectDisk\PerfectDisk2008 if PerfectDisk 2008 for Exchange is installed. msxml6.dll is only used by PerfectDisk for Exchange. msxml6.dll is not used by PerfectDisk 2008 Professional, PerfectDisk 2008 Server, PerfectDisk for Windows Home Server, or PerfectDisk for VMware.

If you like, you can delete the Program Files\Raxco\PerfectDisk2008Install folder and contents. For the next update to PerfectDisk 2008, the full installs of PerfectDisk 2008 will have the most recent msxml6.dll file.

To achieve the best "shrinking" of a drive using Vista's disk management tool, you'll need to do the following:

1. Turn off System Restore (warning, turning off System Restore will delete any Restore Points)
2. Perform a Smart Placement or Consolidate Free Space defragmentation pass
3. Perform a boot time defrag
4. Shrink drive