I just noticed that Piriform has released Defraggler, a free defrag tool. You may not recognize the name Piriform, but many will recognize CCleaner, their most popular product.

Defraggler seems a little spiffier than the standard Windows tool, though I’m not yet sure how it compares with Diskeeper, a commercial solution I’ve used in the past. Since I’d deleted many gigs of junk (the Vista “upgrade” kept around my old XP stuff, which still lives on another drive, and I wanted to start fresh, so I deleted my ~10GB in Windows.old), I figured a defrag was in order.

I’d actually downloaded AusLogics Disk Defrag, which claimed a 10% speedup after running, although it didn’t give me a lot of information. It mentioned that I had lots of ‘junk files’ or whatnot, so I went to get CCleaner, and that’s when I noticed Defraggler. So I downloaded that… I still had 15 fragmented files, although that’s not many. One novel feature of Defraggler is that you can defragment a single file if you want.

Of course, my paging file is in about 90 pieces, which seems to always happen to me. (I don’t actually use the paging file often, but I digress.) Enter PageDefrag, a free tool from SysInternals, now owned by Microsoft. It will check fragmentation of various software and let me schedule a boot-time defrag of those files, since they normally can’t be touched while Windows is running. (Aside: you should do a “normal” disk defrag first, so that PageDefrag has better odds of having a big, contiguous chunk of disk space to use.)

The wall I’ve currently run into is that PageDefrag doesn’t run on Vista. (I’m not sure I buy it, but a case could be made that a fragmented paging file isn’t necessarily bad: if you’re not writing anything too big, it might be beneficial to have a ‘nearby’ sector to write in.