Question on defragging.

I have already turned System Restore off to remove old points.
Have removed all unwanted and unneeded programs and folders.
Yet when I defrag, it always shows as being 15%+ fragmented.
Cannot get lower than that and cannot find out which files or folders is fragmented.
Question is "How can I find out or get a better defragging?"

 

1: UltimateDefrag (freeware version).
2: XP Home SP3 Format is NTFS. !.5GB PC-3200 RAM.

All backups go to an external drive.
Will try the Safe Mode and report.

 

Went to Safe Mode.
Asked which I wanted to boot to.
Only option of ANY OS was an xxClone copy.
Had tried to clone to another drive before, but certainly not to the one being copied.
Fragmentation in Safe Mode was 0.006%.
Went back to Normal mode, fragmentation now shows as 15.095%.

 

Hi hrlow2

The paging file could be a big part of that.

You could turn off paging on that drive, temporarily, or move it to another
partition, temporarily, then reboot, defrag, then turn paging back on.

Also, wondering if there is stuff in the Recycle Bin, does that get defraged?

I use PageDefrag set to run on every boot with zero second delay.

Rather than turning System Restore OFF, you could use CCleaner's > Tools > System Restore
to delete some old restore points, except for the most recent point.

Don't know if the Hibernation file, C:\hiberfile.sys, can get fragmented.
If it is, that file is as big as your RAM, which is 1.5 gigabytes!!

You could defrag that by turning Off hibernation, reboot, check to see that
the file has been deleted, then re-enable hibernation.

 

Page file is turned off. Don't feel needed with 3.5GB RAM and less than 2 GB ever being used.
Recycle Bin emptied daily.
Don't do Hibernation,either. Folding 24/7 or working on it.
Or else it's powered down for a breather.

 

May I suggest the following:

http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/

Has worked great for me.


Also there is Defraggler.


http://www.piriform.com/defraggler


You might want to consider going to Win 7. It does a good job of defragging your HD, since it does it every week, and doesn't really affect performance.

 

Thanks for the links, David.
I have read the aumha article before, but the pagefile size issue is really confusing because there is so much conflicting info and advice on the web.

The recommendations in those two articles seem to be in sync.

Also helpful were the suggestions HERE about the placement of the pagefile and also this Microsoft article about How to move the paging file in Windows XP

P.S.
There is a link on the aumha page for XP Pagefile Monitor which is a great little utility for tracking actual pagefile usage.

 

Well, I agree that 15 percent is really not an issue. But, ultimately, he's going to have to move away from XP someday. Maybe this is an excuse to?

 

Getting ready to give this machine to a friends family as an upgrade to their older P3 powered machine.
Trying to get it as good as possible first.
Machine is pretty fast as is, but just irritates me that the numbers won't come down.
Still don't understand about the boot-up option being an xxClone copy, though.

 

Just wondering if Partition Wizard might shed some light on that.

 

Just the 1 C partition on the drive.

 

15% fragmentation could be system files other than the page file- MFT, hibernation file etc.

For the hibernation file (if there is one), you could disable hibernation, reboot, defrag and then re-enable hibernation.

For the other system files, you could get the free trial versions of one of the reliable commercial autodefrag utilities, these evaluation versions work just like the full versions for about a month, which is (more than) sufficient time to clean out the drives.