ok i use ccleaner all the time defrag very regular and run all my file cleaners. dont surf the net a ton pretty much always go to the same 10 or 12 sites , but recently i have been leaving my computer on during the night , and i came home the other day and my available memory was like 1 % wich was 56 percent less then the day before , i tried to run my defrag and it said i had to have 15% to run . so i erased all my halo stuff and a couple other programs . and it was back up to 25% then i ran defrag again and it went back down to 4% so i shut my computer off and restarted it and it was back up to 35% but there are a ton of those red bars on the defrag screen. and the report tells me that some could not be defreged. it says 500 fragments file size 16.00 GB location documents and settings\owner\local.... something or other it wont let me see the rest . i dont have alot on my computer and i want to get rid of all this crap.

XP's Defragger leaves a lot to be desired. Try the "Defraggler" by Piriform, the same people who make CCleaner. It's free and works great!

Be sure to stop all running programs when you use it, like Anti-virus, anti-spyware, etc. You'll get much better results:

http://www.defraggler.com/

Musky
If the voices inside my head paid rent, I'd be rich!

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>> i came home the other day and my available memory was like 1 % wich was 56 percent less then the day before , i tried to run my defrag and it said i had to have 15% to run <<

So what has available memory got to do with defrag. Defrag won't even do anything for available disk space.

What is this it you mention?. If it is percent of fragmentation, don't worry about it. Many people get hung up on de-fragmentation when it is not that important. Defrag is only something you need worry about when the computer starts slowing down.

Stuart

If you read the legend in defrag I believe the red bars indicate files that cannot be moved. This is normal behavior for Windows.

"Many people get hung up on de-fragmentation when it is not that important"

I sure would like to understand how you arrived at this conclusion.

Do you know that with ntfs that if the drive becomes severely fragmented it won't boot and your ONLY solution is to wipe the disk and reinstall from scratch?

How about the "file not found" like with boot.ini, ntldr etc? Source is a non defragged drive and those files are beyond the 1024 boot boundry.

Defrag is just as important as all the other routine maintenance you should be doing on your computer. Note the "routine".

"only do it when the system slows down"
Do you only change your oil when your car slows down?

Imagine the power of knowing how to internet search
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Teachin...

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I think part of the OP's topic was refering to memory leak as a result of not turning the computer off. Also the 15% is hard drive space needed as working room to shuffle fragments around while reassembling them during the defrag process. Defrag is meant to minimize the searching that the heads need to do in order to access a file thus increasing access speed. Musky, Does your suggestion of closing programs apply to XP's defrag too? Bluejay

Fragmentation not a problem?
Highly debatable!

"This disparity is minimized as long as the drive’s read/write head can just go to a single location on the disk and read off all the
information. Similarly, it isn’t an issue with tiny text files which fit comfortably into a single 4K sector on a drive. But the huge gulf in
speed between a disk and the CPU/memory is a severe problem when the disk is badly fragmented. A single 9MB PDF report, for
example,may be split into 2,000 sectors scattered about the drive, each requiring its own I/O command before the document can
be reassembled.
This is even a significant situation with brand new hardware. A recently purchased HP workstation, for example,was found to
have a total of 432 fragmented files and 23,891 excess fragments, with one file split into 1,931 pieces. 290 directories were also
fragmented right out of the box, including the Master File Table (MFT) with 18 pieces. Essentially, this means that the user of this
new system never experiences peak performance on that machine.
And it gets steadily worse over time.A few years ago,American Business Research Corporation of Irvine,CA, surveyed 100 large
corporations and found that 56 percent of existing Windows 2000 workstations had files containing between 1,050 and 8,102
pieces, and a quarter had files ranging from 10,000 to 51,222 fragments. A similar situation existed on servers where half the
corporations reported files split into 2000 to 10,000 fragments and another third of the respondents found files with between
10,001 and 95,000 pieces.Not surprisingly, these firms were experiencing crippled performance degradation."

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...

I've been doing a little experimenting with the defrag process lately, mostly using "Defraggler". I found that if programs are running like A/Vs, etc. When it's finished I have more fragments remaining then I do with everything shut down, or I do it in safe mode. I'm no expert by any means, this is just my observations.

In the old Win9X systems, running the defrag from safe mode always worked faster for me with less errors and "freeze ups".

By the way Othehill, red bars in Windows defragger indicates fragmented files, not "unmovable files" those are green bars.

Musky
If the voices inside my head paid rent, I'd be rich!

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>> How about the "file not found" like with boot.ini, ntldr etc? Source is a non defragged drive and those files are beyond the 1024 boot boundry. <<

I defrag about once every six months or so when I have nothing better do to with my time. I have never had file not found due to a badly fragmented drive.

The 1024 boot boundary limitation is a BIOS limitation. It doesn't apply if the BIOS has Int 13 extensions which overcomes this problem providing the OS can use Int 13 extensions. The 1024 boundary was a result of the CHS addressing mode which is not used on todays huge hard disks. Most BIOS in use today will have the Int 13 extension. Version of Windows after Windows NT can use Int 13 extensions therefore it's no longer a problem.

Stuart

Hi Jim,

First off you need some free space for XP to be able to defrag, and ideally the more the better. Try scanner from stefan gerlach

http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/

Easy to use and will give you a chart showing where all those hidden files are taking up room, that you didn't know about.

Second, the other are right about Windows Defragmenter not being very good, and while defraggler is good (although stilll in beta) i prefer Ultradefrag

http://sourceforge.net/project/show...

And as some of your files are in memory, it won't ba able to defrag them, Ultradefrag will allow you to defrag on reboot.

And third and final, you should also where possible defrag your page file and registry, and this is where page PageDefrag comes in handy.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...

Again very easy to use, just run it and tell it to defrag on reboot. Simple.

Hope this helps,

p.s. Thinking about it defraggler might be better as its easier to use than UltraDefrag the others though are very straight forward.

Adam

www.pconsupport.co.uk

Musky, thanks for correcting me. I was going by memory, which ain't as good as it used to be.

I never want to meet you at a traffic light! LOL

Musky
If the voices inside my head paid rent, I'd be rich!

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I'm not color blind, just old and feeble.

nascent , thanks for the help that scanner thing is the greatest thing ever invented, and the defragler is awesome, thanks for the help everyone that scanner is better because you can find all the crap folders that you forgot about, my computer is back to to 70% space avalable and smokin fast , i only have one more question when i defrag the same file come up as not getting defraged it is , in doc&settings , in owner, my index.hash.gthr.dir, whrn i run gefragler it lets me open the file to look at it but not sure what it is and the KB is in the millions kb,s or mb,s im not sure would have to look again , and once again i owe you guys a ton and if you ever start taking donations ill be the first. thx again

this is the file i was talking about and the defrag report.. from defragler....
(C:), NTFS, Capacity: 67.7 GB, Used: 24.7 GB (36%), Free: 43.0 GB (64%)
-----------
16.0 GB of Fragmented Files, 1 Fragmented Files, 55 Total Fragments
-----------
MyIndex.Hash.gthr.Dir 55 17179934720 C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Desktop Search\Applications\RSApp\Projects\MyIndex\