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  1. Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Posts
    2,605
    #1
    Can you recommend a good free defragmenter for win xp? My drive is heavily fragmented from downloading *******s, 38% fragmentation. Used windows defragmenter to no avail.

  2. Join Date
    Jul 2006
    Posts
    1,731
    #2
    which means your hard disk may have a bad sector... run scan disk or the error checking utility with option of bad sector checking on restart then use defrag.

  3. Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Posts
    4,866
    #3
    heavy fragmentation is not actually a sign na may bad sector na yung hard drive.

    think of the hard drive platters as a pizza. cut the pizza into wedges, then idivide mo pa each wedge into smaller pieces, and so on - that's a representation of the sectors in your hard drive. as data gets written on the hard drive, it goes to the first available free sector, and so on. now, if you delete some data taking up a couple of sectors, once new data is written, some of it may be put into the newly-freed sectors, or the other sectors na always free before. repeat the process, and that's how fragmentation happens.

    now how is this bad?

    if you're familiar with those choose-your-own-adventure books (addict ako nun nung gradeschool, yun lang dahilan ko to go to the library, hehehe), diba you keep skipping pages instead of front cover to back cover yung babasahin mo (usual books)? ganun if fragmented, matatagalan magbasa yung system from the drive kasi kesa less than one sweep to get all the data for a sequential or lightly fragmented hard drive, it has to do at least one full sweep of all the sectors, adding to the access time.

    when you're running defrag, the best way to do it is in safe mode and with the screensaver and any other startup applications off as they interfere with the data-in-the-sector rearrganging process, forcing defrag to go back to square one.

    anyway, nobela na nasulat ko. hyper nako with a lot of brazo de mercedes ice cream. hehehehehehe!!!

  4. Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Posts
    2,605
    #4
    downloaded diskeeper helped a little. Is it possible that my having 20% free disk space left hinders defragmentation?

  5. Join Date
    Aug 2003
    Posts
    9,720
    #5
    er...doesn't xp come with its own defragmenter?

  6. Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Posts
    12,347
    #6
    Quote Originally Posted by userfriendly View Post
    downloaded diskeeper helped a little. Is it possible that my having 20% free disk space left hinders defragmentation?
    Normally, it's 10%. But, if you take into account XP having a dynamic page file, then maybe even 20% may hinder the defrag. That's why I always have 2 internal hard drives. I keep Windows XP in one drive, the page file in another. I also keep the page file permanent by keeping the Max and Min Size the same. That way, I'm always sure of the real size of free space left.

  7. Join Date
    Nov 2006
    Posts
    2,389
    #7
    i think there should be anough space to defrag. my other system only had 15% of disk space left... i got a box saying that i need this amount of space to continue defragmenting... so i moved all my mp3s to an external drive

  8. Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Posts
    2,605
    #8
    Quote Originally Posted by badkuk View Post
    er...doesn't xp come with its own defragmenter?
    yes it does used it but heavy fragmentation pa rin. Can't reduce my fragmentation below 38%

    Quote Originally Posted by Jun aka Pekto View Post
    Normally, it's 10%. But, if you take into account XP having a dynamic page file, then maybe even 20% may hinder the defrag. That's why I always have 2 internal hard drives. I keep Windows XP in one drive, the page file in another. I also keep the page file permanent by keeping the Max and Min Size the same. That way, I'm always sure of the real size of free space left.
    Laptop so only one drive. How do you change the size of the page file? I'll try burning my *******s into dvds and deleting them from my hard drive. Just need to buy blank dvds. Then defrag again.

  9. Join Date
    Aug 2003
    Posts
    3,273
    #9
    Laptop so only one drive. How do you change the size of the page file? I'll try burning my *******s into dvds and deleting them from my hard drive. Just need to buy blank dvds. Then defrag again.
    page file size is at:
    My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory > Change

    Normally, it's 10%. But, if you take into account XP having a dynamic page file, then maybe even 20% may hinder the defrag. That's why I always have 2 internal hard drives. I keep Windows XP in one drive, the page file in another. I also keep the page file permanent by keeping the Max and Min Size the same. That way, I'm always sure of the real size of free space left.
    side note: since you have two hard drives you can have two page files - one on each drive. ang hindi lang pwede is having page files in multiple partitions on a single hard drive.

  10. Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Posts
    12,347
    #10
    Quote Originally Posted by roninblade View Post
    page file size is at:
    My Computer > Properties > Advanced > Performance > Settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory > Change



    side note: since you have two hard drives you can have two page files - one on each drive. ang hindi lang pwede is having page files in multiple partitions on a single hard drive.
    I rather keep the (permanent) page file on one physical hard drive and Windows on another. It's a setup I've used all the way from Win 3.1. I don't care what MS says. All the versions of Windows I've used with that setup have been very speedy and stable up to this point. I'm going to stick with the same setup in Vista.

    As for defrag. I do temporarily disable the page file while the defrag process is ongoing and then re-enable it again once defrag is done.

    I also have 2 gb of ram. So, one page file should be sufficient.

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