I would have thought, only if you do it from Dos, like regcompact.
Then it struck me, if you defrag from within windows, does the OS get
defragged - surely the files are in use.
Any answers, please, should I defrag from outside windows?
From what I've read recently, defragging is not nearly as critical as
it was 5+ years ago. Modern drives are good enough that the data can
be read in whatever state the data is in without slowdowns.
I have a good pair of 7200 rpm drives, each with an 8 meg cache,
running XP on a 2.4 ghz processor, and I can tell no difference
whatsoever. I have run defrag from the Ultimate Boot CD 4 Win and this
also did not speed up the machine to where I could detect it.
I have a gig of ram and I have disabled the swapfile, again with no
slowdowns.
If you have an older drive, defragging might well be beneficial,
however.
My favorite defragger: PowerDefragger
http://www.excessive-software.tk/
"Power Defragmenter is a GUI (Graphic User Interface) application for
program Contig by Sysinternals.
Contig is a very powerful defragmentation application designed for
Windows NT/2000/XP operating systems."
Interesting utility: PageDefrag
http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html
"One of the limitations of the Windows NT/2000 defragmentation
interface is that it is not possible to defragment files that are open
for exclusive access. Thus, standard defragmentation programs can
neither show you how fragmented your paging files or Registry hives
are, nor defragment them. Paging and Registry file fragmentation can
be one of the leading causes of performance degradation related to
file fragmentation in a system.
PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial
defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your
paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In
addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP
hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a
laptop).
PageDefrag works on Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and
Server 2003."
Another interesting utility: avast! External Control
http://www.excessive-software.tk/
"avast! External Control (AEC) tool was designed to extend avast!
Antivirus functionality and security.
AEC gives you almost full control over avast! Home Edition or
Professional Edition.
You can change update check interval, tweak many hidden settings and
view detailed avast! Antivirus status.
External avast! component launcher gives you ability to scan files
externally or even schedule Boot-Time scan directly from AEC. avast!
Status Info function can be used to dump status log, so Alwil staff
can easily help you on avast! Forums. Most functions is limited to
Windows 2000/XP only.
AEC is a standalone application (extract&use) with integrated Smart
Auto-Update feature."