Defragment Your System Files (Pagefile and Registry) in Windows XP
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.
Thanks to Reader Shawn for suggesting this as a topic.
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.
Very nice, I've been looking for an application similar to this for ages now.
You do a great job. I wish I knew 1/4 as much. Keep up the good work. Eddie
You won't need this program most of the time, but when it is needed there is nothing like it. System file fragmentation really will hurt performance, especially on machines with lower memory and slow hard drives. This program is part of the incomparable sysinternals suite: http://technet.microsoft.com/e.....42062.aspx
To see if you need to run program, just start it. As you can see in the image above, all of the How-To Geek's system files were already in 1 piece, and you can't do better than that. Most of the time this will be true. I've only run into system file fragmentation trouble on a machine with very limited hard drive space.
I personally do not see a big need for this tool, like others have said. Unless you install and uninstall a ton of software and its been years since your last reformat it won't really do much good.
For my systems I've got a cron (technically a automated task in the Windows world) to automatically defrag using contig. This is the best lightweight and totally functional tool for defragging a hard drive.
It should be noted that the computers I run a defrag on each night do video editing. They move massive chunks of data around and therefore need to be defragmented quite often. Weekly would work, but nightly is even better in my situation.
I used TuneXP
This definitely isn't something you need to run all the time… it's just a one of a kind tool that really does it's job well.
If your pagefile is configured to grow automatically it can get fragmented. The same problem happens with the hibernate file…. if you run disk cleanup it removes the file, so when it's created again it might be fragmented.
The registry is probably less likely to be fragmented, but it's certainly possible over time.
Thanks, I have been wanting a utility like this.
I noticed this article is in the xp section? Would this also needed to be done on vista machines?
Another helpful defrag item: From the command line (in either XP or Vista) run "defrag c: -b" This is a undocumented but legit command to defragment the prefetch folder in XP or the Superfetch folder in Vista. First time you run it, it may take several minutes. After that, it's pretty quick.
when i try to defragment my c drive in which windows xp is installed ,it shows an error of missing file "some '.dll' file" to check the disk and defragment the drive .please reply me as soon as possible .