disk defragmentation

  • Thread starter Thread starter Terry Liittschwager
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T

Terry Liittschwager

My desktop machine has been slowing down a little lately, and I
decided to do a little looking around.

I use the defragmentation utility available in Win Explorer >
Properties > Tools. I finally bothered to look at the report
generated, and it turns out my page file is in over 300 fragments.
Apparently, the utility doesn't bother to defragment the page file.

Anyway, I'm going to get a third party defragmenter. Does anyone have
any recommendations for such.

Also, just out of curiosity, is there a way without using a third
party utility to get WinXP to consolidate the page file.

Thanks in advance for info you can give.

Terry Liittschwager
 
If you have two drives you solve the page file fragmentation problem by
moving it from one drive to the other.
 
Control panel / admin tools / local security settings / local policies /
security options

shutdown: clear virtual memory pagefile

Enable it.

Restart & defrag
 
Jerry said:
If you have two drives you solve the page file fragmentation problem by
moving it from one drive to the other.
Click to expand...

I thought of doing that, but, won't it fragment on the second drive as well
if the second drive is also used for other things? Or can you actually
defrag the Swap Files when they are on a second drive?

Rob
 
Very clever! 8>}

Federico said:
Control panel / admin tools / local security settings / local policies /
security options

shutdown: clear virtual memory pagefile

Enable it.

Restart & defrag
Click to expand...
 
frogspawn said:
Very clever! 8>}
Click to expand...

But it may still end up fragmented if you don't have, say, a gig of
contiguous free space.

Better:

shutdown: clear virtual memory pagefile.
Restart & defrag
Enable pagefile
Restart
 
After a defrag, I would hope to have that much contiguous disk space
available. Otherwise, I reeeeally have a problem.
 
Terry Liittschwager said:
My desktop machine has been slowing down a little lately, and I
decided to do a little looking around.
Click to expand...
I use the defragmentation utility available in Win Explorer >
Properties > Tools. I finally bothered to look at the report
generated, and it turns out my page file is in over 300 fragments.
Apparently, the utility doesn't bother to defragment the page file.
Click to expand...
Anyway, I'm going to get a third party defragmenter. Does anyone have
any recommendations for such.
Click to expand...

I actually have two comments here:

1. If you really want a third party defragmenter, your best two options are
Diskeeper 9 and PerfectDisk. I have used both, and like both, although they
operate under very different philosophies. I also have used the built-in
defragger and for the life of me I cannot detect any transparent difference
in overall performance between these different programs except that I have to
run the built-in defragger manually while the other two are much easier to
schedule to run in the background.

2. If the problem you are really trying to address is a fragmented
pagefile, you don't need a third party defragmenter to solve it. Here is
what you do. First, temporarily disable the paging file by going to my
computer, right-clicking on properties, clicking the advanced tab, clicking
peformance settings, clicking the advanced tab, clicking the change button
under virtual memory, selecting "No paging file, " then click Okay. Before
you do all this, write down the current values under "custom size" because
you will need to reinstate them later. Second, reboot the computer when
prompted to do so. Third, defrag. Fourth, recreate the page file by
repeating the steps that got you to the virtual memory settings, typing back
in the values you wrote down, and then clicking "custom size," followed by
OK. [Note: you may want to consider making the maximum size slightly
largely than it was before to avoid this problem from happening again in the
future.] XP will create a new unfragmented paging file.

Ken
 
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