Thanks. I have heard about a number of disk defragmentation utilities which are supposed to work faster or somehow better then the Windows XP's own program. Especially anything that would let me defragment with nearly full disk space. I know you aren't supposed to keep your disks full but it is just how things work for me. My main issue is laggy game performance. If you have other solutions please share them.
Move some stuff to another hard-drive first. If you don't have at least 10% of your drive free -- preferably 20% or more -- forget about being able to effectively defragment your drive. For one thing, larger files (e.g. video files) will not be able to be defragmented because there is not enough contiguous free space in which to re-assemble them. You probably know this, but Windows likes plenty of free space to work well. I try to never exceed 50% capacity on my "C" Drive -- and, I would think this an excellent idea for you to improve your gaming programs operations. I added a second internal hard-drive in the available prepared space in my Desktop, and store stuff there (instead of cluttering my "C" Drive).
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conquistador Deactivated User
Hellhamster. 2947 Posts 10/03
Posted - Nov 2 2007 : 6:29AM
I have 3 300gb drives and they are all (were) near capacity. One is filled with heaps and heaps of VHS rips. One is full of gaming related stuff. And the other is where all my hamster photos and other junk is housed. I think you're right. I cleared my gaming drive to 22% and defrag froze at 44%.
I've been using Raxco's PerfectDisk on my workstations and servers for a few years now. [ invalid url ] sez: "What I like is that, well, first of all, PerfectDisk does defrag the so-called metadata areas, which nothing else will do because it does it as a boot-time defrag, like a preboot defrag. But Vopt and Perfect Disk both do something else, and that is they look at the amount of use you’re giving to the data and arrange it for faster booting. So, and again, PerfectDisk does an even better job than Vopt, which is why I bought PerfectDisk even though I owned Vopt already. PerfectDisk looks at all the files that are used at boot time and moves them to the very front of the drive, and also looks at the frequency of use. Files you don’t use very often it puts next. Files you modify sometimes it puts in a big block after that. And then files that are being modified all the time it puts right next to the free area. The beauty of that is that it tends to centralize your fragmentation, which minimizes head activity, and it means that subsequent defrags run much more quickly because the files that are changing often are the ones that are getting fragmented, and they’re right next to the unused area in the drive, allowing them to be redefragged much more quickly. So it’s really my current favorite right now is PerfectDisk."
Unless you've added a second internal hard-drive, your "D" Drive is probably a partition where your computer's original software package is stored for restore and re-install functions. Don't mess with it.
A number of the geekier people that I keep up with recommend Diskeeper Lite. http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1207 Free.Can't say about that part. I intend to use it here, next time I defrag. They say that it is MUCH faster than defrag that comes with Win98 which I use. I do have it already installed though. It has a neat "analyze" function.
