SQL Server Magazine

An Unbeatable Defragmentation Utility
Golden Bow Systems' VoptXP
Cliff Schaut has been in the technology industry since the mid-1980s. Having evaluated countless defragmentation utilities, Schaut believes that nothing beats Golden Bow Systems' VoptXP when it comes to defragmenting end-user systems. He explains, "Other defrag utilities do just enough to get the job done and don't contain the functionality that's required for today's technology needs. VoptXP accommodates the larger hard drive defragmentation process by giving you complete control. The product lets you dissect clusters and sectors to determine why a specific file is corrupt or continually fragmented, and how this relates directly to disk health and drive life cycles." The ability to dissect clusters helps you obtain a true analysis of how well VoptXP performed and what was actually done during the defragmentation process—a feature some utilities lack. The Windows-embedded defragmentation utility, according to Schaut, offers only Analyze and Defragment options and doesn't provide the analysis you need to understand your system.

Schaut also said that VoptXP's manageable interface makes it easier to analyze and view the defragmentation information and determine whether he needs to take further steps to improve system performance. He has used and referred others to VoptXP since 1999, and people continually tell him that their computers have never performed so well.

Manage Your RDP Connections
visionapp Remote Desktop
Markus Kolbeck works for a company that has more than 100 servers that users log on to from onsite and offsite, all of which he needs to connect to on a regular basis. In the past, managing all the RDP connections was troublesome for Kolbeck. Additionally, he had to log on and off from each individual server—a time-consuming and tedious task. Kolbeck tried changing the Group Policy Object (GPO) settings for Terminal Server to log user sessions off automatically after a period of time. However, doing so caused problems when he wanted to monitor services or processes. To help him manage his RDP connections, Kolbeck downloaded visionapp Remote Desktop (vRD). vRD let him add and group his connections with the option to use globally defined user-credential settings. The group option also lets Kolbeck arrange his servers—such as domain controllers (DCs), Terminal Servers, and mail servers— within logical folders.

"Although vRD doesn't log off connections, it can disconnect from all selected servers at once," said Kolbeck. "You can also specify display and local device settings for each connection. Best of all, vRD is free!"

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