Has any one else noticed that when you defrag with Home XP that the unmoveable green bit (I presume its windows install) after awhile has moved up from where it was at the begining of the install? I cannot under stand this, If as windows says Its unmoveable. I have looked at friends PC'S and theirs has done the same. Can any one tell us why and is it harmfull? etc,etc. TTFN

Most of the unmovable file are actually your pagefile. You can disable this in the advanced system properties and then defragment. You'll notice that all or most of the unmovalbe files are gone. BTW It is not harmful Sandman

Thanks Sandman, where do you find this cure? and explain BTW? TTFN

Open the System control panel and click on the advanced tab. Click on the top settings button under "Performance" click the advanced tab in the new window that opened and click the "Change" button at the bottom. Then select "No paging file" and click the "Set" button. Make sure to write down or remember your old settings though. After you restart run the disk defragmenter and you will see all/most of the unmoveable file are gone. After defrag is done go back to the system setting and re-enable the pagefile. This will move all your program and system files close together and will put the pagefile after them. If you run disk defragmenter after doing the above you'll see what I mean. This is normal behavior; it's just how windows writes the files to your disk. In Win9x when a file was to be written to a drive it would start writing the file in the first available spot without trying to find a big enough spot to write the whole file out. This is fragmentation, having different parts of the same file on different parts of the disk. Fragmentation is NOT having (whole) files on different parts of the disk. That’s why Win9x was bad about fragmenting. WinXp and Win2k both look for a spot big enough to write the entire file out first. This is why defragmenting is needed less often and shows less performance improvement then defragmenting Win9x did. Sandman

Sandman thank you! I have now seen for my self what you say. I take it that you must "reanable" the page file settings? or can you leave them switched off? Bear-with me I am getting there. Thanks once again for letting me and no doubt many others a little insite into how PC's (XP) work. (Great Site, simply the best) Cheers TTFN

Yes you will want to re-enable the pagefile. Glad I could help out :) Sandman P.S. BTW = by the way