Headset maker stops PC slowdown

NASA's preferred headset provider uses disk fragmentation software

Plantronics manufactures headsets

Headset manufacturer Plantronics has deployed Diskeeper software to prevent disk fragmentation slowing down its PCs.

The company has installed the product across its 250 associate offices across Europe, at a price of “£20-something per user, per year”, according to Philip Jones, IT manager at Plantronics Europe.

“Prior to having Diskeeper, we were like a lot of companies; we had hard disk failure, data corruption and performance slowdown. Performance slowdown is very common, at work or at home, we’ve all experienced this,” explained Jones.

He said the problem of performance slowdown lies in disk fragmentation. Fragmentation happens to a hard disk over time as the user saves, modifies, or deletes files.

The changes that are saved are often stored at a location on the hard disk that is different from the original file, and further changes are saved to even more locations. Over time, both the file and the hard disk itself become fragmented, and the computer slows down as it has to search in many different places just to open a file.

“Brand new PCs run like a dream, but every month they slow down. It’s so gradual that most users don’t even realise it until they see someone else with a new PC.”

In order to combat those problems, Jones ran a trial to evaluate the Diskeeper 9 product using 20 randomly-selected PCs. Half of the employees were told that they were going to be testing Diskeeper on their computers and the other half ran the test blind.

Nineteen out of the 20 people who trialled the product found their computers faster and more reliable. Encouraged by these results, Jones rolled out Diskeeper's newest release, Diskeeper 10, across Plantronics' European operation.

“This worked incredibly well,” he said. “The aspect that I find most useful is the real-time defrag feature.

“Diskeeper is constantly defragging your system, using spare system resource, and there is no need to schedule or even worry about fragmentation, and it has now almost disappeared into the background – speeding up performance, and requiring very little of our time to manage.”

He added that the product has caused an increase in the lifespan of all PCs from three to four years.

Plantronics’ most notable claim to fame is that moon landing astronaut Neil Armstrong made his “one small step for man” speech over a Plantronics headset.