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In the pursuit for performance, making sure your drive isn’t fragmented is a regular task. The problem is that Windows XP doesn’t allow certain system files to be defragmented without commercial software. What about free solutions?

There’s a utility called PageDefrag from Sysinternals (Microsoft) that lets you do one single task, and it does it well. It runs as a boot-time process that defragments the system files before they are locked by XP.

Defragment Your System Files

When you open up the application, you’ll see a list of the system files and the number of fragments each file is in. Select the “Defragment at next boot” option, or you could even choose to defragment at every boot, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that.

When you reboot, you’ll be prompted by PageDefrag to hit a key if you don’t want to defragment now.

If you didn’t abort the defrag, you’ll now see the defragment in process. As you can see, mine didn’t need to be defragmented anyway…

If you selected the option to defragment on every boot but would like to remove it, you can open up the application and select “Don’t defragment (uninstall)”, and then click the OK button.

This should be an essential utility in any geek’s toolkit. Note that this isn’t a substitute for defragmenting your other files on a regular basis.

Download PageDefrag from microsoft.com

Continue reading »]]> The Disk Defragment utility in Windows XP does not include a way to defragment all hard drives at the same time, which is inconvienient when you have more than one hard drive in your computer. The method we are going to use is by creating a batch file to defragment all of the drives, one after the other. The disk defrag utility in Windows XP can be triggered from the command line with the following syntax:

Windows Disk Defragmenter Copyright (c) 2001 Microsoft Corp. and Executive Software International, Inc.

Usage:

defrag <volume> [-a] [-f] [-v] [-?]

volume drive letter or mount point (d: or d:volmountpoint)

-a Analyze only

-f Force defragmentation even if free space is low

-v Verbose output

-? Display this help text

First, we’ll create a file named defragall.bat, and place it anywhere you like, as long as you’ll remember where it is. If you want to run it from the command line, you could place it in the \windows directory so that it will be available in the system path.

For each hard drive, add a line to the batch file. For instance, if we want to defragment drives C: , D: , and F: we will add these three lines:

defrag c:-f

defrag d: -f

defrag f: -f

To run the defrag, just either double-click on the batch file or start it from the command line.