John said:
Yep. It's "Drive people nutsware".
I am using XPsp2 for over a year and never tried the MS defrag since the
Win98se defrag was lousy. I started using Diskeeper Lite (formerly by
Executive Software International - now: Diskeeper Corporation), which I
think is pretty good. But SURPRISE...
At a PC Club meeting last Wednesday we had a demo of Diskeeper 9 (full $
version). As a result of some questions that were raised I did some
Google-ing and found the following MS site:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/227463/ that states the Diskkeeper
program is the current basis of MS'XP defragger. Interesting, huh?
The following is the title and first sentence of the article. The
entire article can be read at the aforementioned url.
Disk Defragmenter Limitations in Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows
Server 2003
View products that this article applies to.
Article ID : 227463
Last Review : October 29, 2003
Revision : 5.0
This article was previously published under Q227463
SUMMARY
The Disk Defragmenter tool is based on the full retail version of
Diskeeper by Executive Software International, Inc. [now Diskeeper
Corp.]
I read the additional article that indicates that the MS XP Defragger
includes an automatic process that maximizes the resorted data by
capturing program usage every three days and defragging based on opened
programs (i.e., used software). That result in greater efficiency by
positioning the most used programs in the areas most readily accessed by
the drive read head. The data is captured in the file "Layout.ini" and
is update every three days during idle system periods. Sounds pretty
good to me. I'm impressed!
Here is an extract from that second article.
How does this scheme provide a performance benefit? The answer lies in
the fact that during typical system boot or application startup, the
order of faults is such that some pages are brought in from one part of
a file, then from another part of the same file, then pages are read
from a different file, then perhaps from a directory, and so on. This
jumping around results in moving the heads around on the disk. Microsoft
has learned through analysis that this slows boot and application
startup times. By prefetching data from a file or directory all at once
before accessing another one, this scattered seeking for data on the
disk is greatly reduced or eliminated, thus improving the overall time
for system and application startup.
To minimize seeking even further, every three days or so, during system
idle periods, the Task Scheduler organizes a list of files and
directories in the order that they are referenced during a boot or
application start, and stores the list in a file named
\Windows\Prefech\Layout.ini. Figure 1 [NOT CAPTURED] shows the contents
of a prefetch directory, highlighting the layout file. Then it launches
the system defragmenter with a command-line option that tells the
defragmenter to defragment based on the contents of the file instead of
performing a full defrag. The defragmenter finds a contiguous area on
each volume large enough to hold all the listed files and directories
that reside on that volume and then moves them in their entirety into
that area so that they are stored one after the other. Thus, future
prefetch operations will even be more efficient because all the data to
be read in is now stored physically on the disk in the order it will be
read. Since the number of files defragmented for prefetching is usually
only in the hundreds, this defragmentation is much faster than full
defragmentations.
Any comment on a better freeware product that does more than the XP defrag?
