My Windows hard drive is a 60GB drive, and is always full-ish. With 8% free space (really good for this drive!), a defrag doesn’t get a lot accomplished. The small files are reassembled, but none of the big ones. There’s not enough room to piece together the paging file.
So here’s how I, a definite OCD-sufferer, am cleaning up my Windows machine:
- Create a desktop folder, “Crap,” and drag everything on the desktop into it, except for things that I know should definitely stay.
- Plug in external 500GB hard drive.
- Move the Crap folder to the external drive.
- Move everything in My Documents to the external drive.
- Empty the trash bin.
- Run CCleaner.
- Fire up your paid version of Diskeeper (it’s worth it, I promise: and I hate paying for software). Set up a boot-time defrag, and have it get the paging file and MFT as well.
- Move everything back. Or, realize that you don’t need 3/4 of it and don’t move it back.
Warning: I’m somewhat concerned that some things might not take well to being moved around, like my iTunes Library. I’m posting this as I’m finishing up copying everything over, so it’s possible that this isn’t going to work out as I planned. We’ll see…
There was a time before defrag tools – yes another “when I was young comment” – when the only way to defrag was to backup the whole disk, reformat the hard drive and then copy all the data back. One had to backup to tape which was scary because it was not as reliable as one would like. You never knew if it would all return. But performance was much worse with a fragmented hard drive so sometimes it just had to be done. Smart people made several backups. The frist defrag tools I used/saw only worked on data disks and not on the b
and not on the bootable system disk. That was seen as just too hard to do savely.
I think that’s what I’m going to have to do!
I cleared off about 20 GB of space. (Which means that most of that other 40 is app data?!)
Then I ran an overnight boot-time defrag of my paging file, etc.
My paging file is still in 261 pieces.
It seems like *most* of the fragmented files are archive files… Except for my paging file, and iTunes.exe (131 pieces). Oh, and some registry files?
I think I’m going to have to disable the paging file and recreate it… I distinctly recall doing this before, though. >:o
Or maybe, get a bootable CD (Knoppix?), move *everything* off of the disk, move it back, and have a perfect filesystem.
But that seems a wee bit risky, even in today’s day and age. (My fear now is more about file corruption than it is about the backup drive dying.)
Huh… I disabled my paging file and removed BF2 (a 4GB game!)… Another boot-time defrag, but I was still left with lots of little ones, so I’m now running it within the OS, which is cleaning those up somewhat.