Hard Disk Defragmentation Tools; Pagefile Too
Hard disk defragmentation is debated often, why I don’t know. It’s like an old Catholic joke about Ash Wednesday - “Might not do any good, won’t do any harm”.
The truth is, though, it’s the hard drive that keeps Intel from making Microsoft look good with blazing speed. Jumping around the drive to get all parts of the monstrous files created by inefficient programmers takes take. It wastes our time.
Defragmenting your hard drive with Windows defragment utility is good; using a third party is probably better, but make sure it uses the Windows API so you are protected from data loss if the process is interrupted.
Sysinternals and its key programmer Mark Russinovich are well known in my trade. Sysinternals was the developer of many valuable Windows tools, some paid, but many absolutely free.Sysinternals was bought by Microsoft but they haven’t ruined it all yet. Microsoft’s website is still a source for some of these great utilities. PageDefrag is one of them. Defragmentation programs cannot defrag a file that is locked by Windows; the page file and registry files are key examples.PageDefrag installs a driver that suspends the boot process after you run PageDefrag and then reboot. During this time before Windows locks the files, PageDefrag defragments these files that otherwise can’t be touched.
Another cool tool is Contig which lets you specify an individual file to defrag.
