[aklug] Re: OT: Defragmenter

I've recently gone down the defrag rabbit hole as well looking for the optimal one and here are some of my thoughts/opinions on the whole shebang.
I totally agree that JKDefrag is a nice quick defragger along with PageDefrag for the page file. While I like JKDefrag, I have ended up using Smart Defrag on my home
machine as it has a free home user license and you can configure it to
auto defrag your system while it's idle, something that JKDefrag does
not have built into it. I believe it requires administrative rights,
so would not work in a standard user account like you would have at
work. For that I'm still on a quest for the optimal defrag software..
But for free home use I like it. You can schedule JKDefrag to start
defragmenting when the computer starts or at certain scheduled times
with AT/Scheduler and you can set how much processing power it will
take up which is nice, but it's running as an adminstrative user so
there's no way for the normal user to stop or delay the job once it's started like you can with Diskkeepr.
For this reason I haven't implemented it on my users..
Also CCleaner to clean up your system especially before an imaging, though I have found that CleanUP! which does something similiar to CCleaner is a more intense tempory file scrubber as it will go into every home directory and purge the Temp Internet Files and so on while CCleaner seems to only do the currrent persons home folder.
One thing I have read was that XP has a builtin defragger of sorts on idle that can conflict with third party defraggers, once you have defragged it with a third party it will then try to defrag it again ala Windows, so you should turn that off. Theres a registry key, or you can do it via TweakUI. Also I have turned off Indexing as it was causing some really bad harddrive thrashing for my users when running an on access scanning antivirus.. The system could be sitting idle but the hard drive would be pegged as the files were Indexed and scanned all at once. The search function still works fine, a little slower, but the trade off is worth it.

-Lee

> Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2009 14:09:36 -0900
> From: royce@alaska.net
> To: aklug@aklug.org
> Subject: [aklug] Re: OT: Defragmenter
>
> Piet van Weel wrote, on 1/7/2009 7:39 PM:
> > After using for years DiskKeeper, I'm finally convinced that they really
> > don't want to produce a quality product anymore. Does anybody have any
> > that they can recommend that will go through and...
> >
> > 1. De-fragment (Duh!)
> > 2. Optimize Paging Files
> > 3. Consolidate Free Space
> > 4. Schedule-able
>
> Summary: I'm a big fan of JKDefrag (Jeroen Kessels) + PageDefrag
> (Sysinternals).
>
> 1. JKDefrag:
> http://kessels.nl/JkDefrag/
>
> - GPL.
> - Very small, no installation required.
> - Great command-line options, including consolidate free space, sort
> based on last access, etc. Puts all directories at the fastest end of
> the disk, just like good ol' Norton SpeedDisk.
> - Good technical info on the main page, including stuff about the MFT,
> the $UsnJrnl file, etc.
> - Excellent use of screen real estate to show very fine-grained detail
> of files.
> - Levels of verbosity that are automatically written to a text file,
> including summary of largest files, defragmentation state, etc.
>
> I do wish that it would let you hover over files and tell you what
> they were; that lack, and the fact that the current version can't
> defrag the MFT, are the only significant drawbacks.
>
> You can use DiskView to see what files are resisting defrag.
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/DiskView.mspx
>
> As to the MFT, it usually only needs to be defragmented once, in my
> experience. Oftentimes it's already in a clean state, but I've seen a
> couple of people - especially those who started out FAT32 and switched
> over to NTFS - with thousands of fragments of MFT, which really seemed
> to drag the system down. I have occasionally used the trial version
> of PerfectDisk, which can defragment the MFT on reboot. I recommend
> running JKDefrag a time or two beforehand, so that there's a nice
> clean space for the MFT to be moved to.
>
> Again, I recommend reading the JKDefrag main page - very educational,
> lots of good links and little-known Windows command-line utilities.
>
>
> 2. PageDefrag:
> http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx
>
> - Schedule at one or all boots; set and forget.
>
>
> If there was a command-line way to delete all but the last system
> restore point, I would run that before running the defrag.
>
> I also recommend firing up SpaceMonger 1.x once in a while to detect
> space hogs for possible paring down, and then using CCleaner to delete
> all of the cruft, prior to a defrag.
>
> http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php
> http://www.ccleaner.com/
>
> Also, be wary of files created under other profiles, as they often
> resist both defrag and automatic (CCleaner) cleanup.
>
> And finally, don't bother defragmenting SSDs (except for consolidating
> free space, as SSD writes work better with contiguous free space, I'm
> told).
>
> This may have been more detail than you needed. ;-)
>
> Royce
>
> --
> Royce D. Williams - http://royce.ws/
> Small groups defend themselves against free riders; big groups don't.S
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Received on Fri Jan 9 09:53:56 2009