Thanks, mouser. I found this post by Joep about DiskTune in the freeware newsgroup this week:

I guess it's not very common for the author of the software to comment but
I'll do that anyway. It's less than a month old. So, I guess as long as
everybody keeps looking at each other for reviews it's going to take a
while. It's really perfectly safe, all file system transactions are handled
by the defrag API. In pre-alphas I have tried all kinds of weird stuff and
dangerous stuff simply isn't processed by this API. It just would tell
DiskTune, I'm not gonna do that, period. The worst that can happen is that
it makes your PC slower (but it's not going to). Well, in that case use your
trusted defragger to clean up the mess. Maybe it's even safer than all other
defraggers because it will prevent your disk from overheating. Others, while
moving large files make your disk temp rise but they don't notice and just
cary on. This is not really a problem for Auslogics etc. because they don't
move a lot at all.

I received a lot of email though. Most very positive even some 'WOWs', many
with suggestions for improvements. Probably I am the one who uses it the
longest but reviewing my own software is a bridge too far. I initially wrote
it for personal use only after trying I guess about 10 other defraggers,
free and commercial.

I didn't like most freewares because they weren't doing a lot. Their
displays and reports showed they defragged. They sometimes claimed enormous
system improvements but I didn't notice them (20% after processing 13 files,
rubbish of course). Auslogics? I didn't notice any difference. SMART Defrag
the same. It even felt slower. The one freeware that actually did do
something was JKDefrag but I found it a bit complex and I didn't want
command-line control only. I am a 'clicker'. Also, JK did make my disk get
really hot. But if you want perfect control over what goes where then
JKDefrag (next version MyDefrag is in beta with even more control) is the
tool of choice.

The commercial ones all installed more than one service/background task and
I don't like that. I think it's ok for a virus scanner to do that because I
want real-time protection. A defrag/optimize is typically something I want
to be able to run on-demand or schedule. Why install and constantly run yet
another scheduler while we have the Windows scheduler? The few commercials I
likes were Puran and Vopt. And PerfectDisk to some degree because it really
made my PC feel faster.

So, then after that I read up on the defrag API, and DiskTune is just the
result of a lot of tinkering in my spare time. A lot of what it does is just
common sense: Outer tracks are faster than inner so let's put stuff in those
that makes the PC feel faster (boot faster, launch faster, load files
faster). Files that fragment are also typically accessed a lot, so let's
make some room to defrag files into those outer tracks as well. So, I tried
a lot of stuff and dang, my PC really runs faster. It boots faster, loads my
game levels faster, makes IE load pages faster etc.. My guess is that
PerfectDisk does even better file placement but it's not my goal to
outperform anyone. DiskTune isn't the fastest either, especially analysis.

Check out a new review of Softmaker Office at http://www.linux.com/feature/153229

Last week, I downloaded an earlier version of Softmaker's software for WinXP after I saw the link at http://lifehacker.com/5087262/softmaker-office-is-a-fast-and-lightweight-office-suite . Softmaker offered me a generous upgrade deal for the 2008 version a few days later and I bought it. Textmaker runs rings around any other word processor that I've used (in WinXP). Rock solid. (Zaine Ridling covered all the good stuff in his review of word processors.) Moreover, it comes with BasicMaker (BM's manual runs to 300+ pages! (Manuals for other office components are even larger)), spreadsheet, presentation software.  :-*

OTOH, I do about 50% of my computing in Ubuntu 8.10, and abiword 2.6.4 works really well in Ubuntu. OpenOffice.org is also plenty fast in linux. (I dual boot on a Dell 3000 running at 3 GHz with 1 GB RAM.) Neither is very fast in WinXP.

Kudos to Softmaker for doing a linux port. Not ready to make a switch in linux--though I did test it on my machine--but they definitely got my attention for WinXP.