The Most Popular PC Utility Ever?

Quick, name the most popular Windows utility that customers are willing to pay for. Actually, The VAR Guy isn’t sure if he has the correct answer to that piece of trivia. But here’s an educated guess.

Sure, dozens of Windows utilities died out in the 1990s. (Anybody else remember SoftRAM and Stacker?) But a few mainstream options live on … and one of them has actually surpassed 25 million licenses sold.

It’s Diskeeper, which reorganizes hard drive data — eliminating so-called file fragments — to accelerate load and save times. While Windows includes a rudimentary version of Diskeeper, the full-blown version remains a strong seller in its own right.

The VAR Guy first wrote about the utility in the 1990s while working for Windows Magazine. Here we are a decade later. The VAR Guy has packed on 10 to 30 pounds (depending on which month we speak to him). And Diskeeper continues humming along. NPD Group, a research firm, estimates that Diskeeper has nearly 90 percent market share in the system utility/general disk utility category. Impressive.

And unlike other utility markets, there’s actually some competition in the defrag market. The folks at CRN recently spent about 1,000 words (maybe more) describing alternatives to Diskeeper. Hmmm. Maybe it’s time for The VAR Guy to switch to a feature-writing gig that … pays … by … the … word …