Pings & Packets from eWEEK Labs

Portfolio 8 Puts Focus on Flexibility

With the latest release of its Portfolio digital asset management program, Extensis focuses on flexibility, letting users manage photos pretty much any way they want to.

One of my favorite features in Portfolio 8, which was released late last year, is the new Scratchpad gallery. Using Scratchpad, I could easily create a collection of photos for printing or sharing. This was much easier than having to create a full catalog item for these images (although you can still do that for more permanent or ordered collections).

I also liked that I could create custom sorts within a gallery simply by dragging and dropping images and that I could set up private, password-protected galleries.

Extensis Portfolio 8, which costs $199.95, runs on Windows and Mac OS X systems. For more information, go to www.extensis.com.

--Jim Rapoza

Diskeeper 10 Stops Defrag Lag

A couple of new features have been added to Diskeepers Diskeeper 10 that make the defragmentation software more suitable for todays servers and applications.

New in this release is native support for 64-bit processors and enhanced support for large data volumes. During tests, Diskeeper 10 ran well on a Hewlett-Packard 9600 workstation with an AMD Opteron 2.6GHz 64-bit processor. With the new Terabyte Volume Engine, Diskeeper 10 can defrag large volumes on DAS, NAS or SAN environments, and up to eight defrag jobs can be run at a time.

One of the most annoying things about defragmentation tools and other disk-intensive utilities (such as anti-virus scanners) is that they tend to slow applications to a crawl while they are running. Diskeeper 10 gets around this with its I/O Smart feature, which can see incoming I/O requests and pause the defrag process until the disks are idle. This will allow IT managers to run defrag jobs without bringing down applications.

The desktop-class Diskeeper 10 Professional Premier Edition costs $49.95; the Diskeeper 10 Server Enterprise Edition with remote management capabilities costs $999.95. Go to www.diskeeper.com for more information.

--Henry Baltazar