Defragment Tips

  • Thread starter Thread starter Chris LeBlanc
  • Start date Start date
C

Chris LeBlanc

I have been having some trouble defragmenting my harddrive and I have
finally found solutions.

I just wanted to pass on tips to anyone else like me who searchs
newsgroups for answers.

My defragment kept finishing what seemed to be early and then would
still say
the drive needed to be defragmented.

Here are a few of the best methods I found.

First of all, always view the report. The files listed that it can't
defragment
are most likely your biggest problem. I, for example, had a few 5 gig
files on a 40 gig drive. It really choked up defrag. On my 2nd larger
drive I didn't really have the space to just move the file there. What
I did instead was to find a folder of smaller files of about that size
and switched them between drives.

I guess this is obvious for anyone who knows how defragment works, by
moving around files so that all pieces are contiguous. Impossible for
huge files like I had.

Also defrag wants at least 15% free. This is a minimum and not
recommended for best results. The more space the better. Sure you can
move around in a phone booth but how far? Check temporary folders for
files you can clean out.
A sneakier way to at least temporarily get more space on your main
drive (assuming, you have more) is to change where your swap/paging
file is. This is more advanced and I wont go into it here. Though it
might be worth looking into for the ultimate defrag. From someone's
else post, they said the pagefile is the only thing windows won't
defrag.

Btw, if your curious as to how i found which folder was 5 gigs, i use
a very useful program called Dfolder. you can find it with google.
What it does is add a tab to the properties of a drive/folder. On that
tab, it will scan your harddrive and list folders with the content
size beside it. Great way to see where all that huge hd space went to.

Another way i like to find big files on my hd is to just search for
*.* then sort by size once done.

Well there you go, I hope that helps other out there like me.
 
Chris

The amount of free space is very important when running Disk Defragmenter. You can run Disk Defragmenter a second and third time if files are still fragmented after the first run. You can put files more prone to fragment in their own partitions.

You can use Windows Explorer to list files over a certain size.

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~~~~~~

Regards.

Gerry

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(e-mail address removed)
Stourport, Worcs, England
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-----Original Message-----
I have been having some trouble defragmenting my harddrive and I have
finally found solutions.

I just wanted to pass on tips to anyone else like me who searchs
newsgroups for answers.

My defragment kept finishing what seemed to be early and then would
still say
the drive needed to be defragmented.

Here are a few of the best methods I found.

First of all, always view the report. The files listed that it can't
defragment
are most likely your biggest problem. I, for example, had a few 5 gig
files on a 40 gig drive. It really choked up defrag. On my 2nd larger
drive I didn't really have the space to just move the file there. What
I did instead was to find a folder of smaller files of about that size
and switched them between drives.

I guess this is obvious for anyone who knows how defragment works, by
moving around files so that all pieces are contiguous. Impossible for
huge files like I had.

Also defrag wants at least 15% free. This is a minimum and not
recommended for best results. The more space the better. Sure you can
move around in a phone booth but how far? Check temporary folders for
files you can clean out.
A sneakier way to at least temporarily get more space on your main
drive (assuming, you have more) is to change where your swap/paging
file is. This is more advanced and I wont go into it here. Though it
might be worth looking into for the ultimate defrag. From someone's
else post, they said the pagefile is the only thing windows won't
defrag.

Btw, if your curious as to how i found which folder was 5 gigs, i use
a very useful program called Dfolder. you can find it with google.
What it does is add a tab to the properties of a drive/folder. On that
tab, it will scan your harddrive and list folders with the content
size beside it. Great way to see where all that huge hd space went to.

Another way i like to find big files on my hd is to just search for
*.* then sort by size once done.

Well there you go, I hope that helps other out there like me.
.
Click to expand...

No one is likely to pay attention to anyone who doesn't
know the difference between "your" and "you're."

Don't defrag unless there's a good reason to do so, and
there's no good reason to do so unless performance has
been affected, or you *know* that a performance hit is
imminent.
 
Wislu Plethora said:
No one is likely to pay attention to anyone who doesn't
know the difference between "your" and "you're."

Don't defrag unless there's a good reason to do so, and
there's no good reason to do so unless performance has
been affected, or you *know* that a performance hit is
imminent.
Click to expand...

Now how long did it take you to find that? I was defragmenting to
repartition. I welcome any opinions you have. I thought most everyone
should do a regular defragmentation of their harddisk. Most utilites
do schedule regular maintenance.

I won't nitpick anyones grammer. However, near run-on sentence comes
to mind.
 
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