Defragmenter

[risk_reversal]

Wonder if someone can recommend a good third party defragmenter please.

Would like it to be stable, work well, be reasonably quick and to uninstall cleanly.

I had Diskeeper Lite on a pc and it was a total dog to unistall and I don't think it worked well at all.

Many thanks for any info provided.

Cheers

[mjc]

Which version of Windows?

[risk_reversal]

Which version of Windows?
Guess that would help. XP

Cheers

[Sylvander]

Is Xfe and/or SyncBack->[run under WINE] within Puppy Linux 3rd party enough?
If so:

Defragged & restored C: in 12 min using Xfe and/or SyncBack in BoxPup (http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=67809).

You first use these to make the backups [of the contents of partition(s)], then delete the original contents, then restore contents.

The quickest, most complete defrag I've ever seen! :)

Only ever tried it on Windows partitions, but I don't see why it wouldn't work on Linux partitions using Xfe.

Just recently used Xfe to copy contents of BoxPup Linux partition to a [folder on a] spare Linux partition.

[risk_reversal]

Sylvander, this is for my young daughter's laptop, so wanted to keep it simple for her.

Cheers

[Paul Komski]

What's wrong with using WinXP's own defrag?

If you want to do it from a batch file or a command prompt then just use:

defrag c: -f -v > defrag.log

leaving out
> defrag.log
if you don't want to be able to read/see a report.

... and using another letter than c: if there is another specific volume you want defragmented.

You can set up task scheduler to run this on a schedule if wanted.

WinXP on an NTFS volume needs defragging on a very infrequent basis.

[Sylvander]

1. "this is for my young daughter's laptop, so wanted to keep it simple for her"
(a) Can it boot a bootable CD?

(b) The next best 3rd party defragmenter I ever used was the defrag capability included as part of "Paragon Hard Disk Manager".
It does a really thorough job of defrag, but does a pretty poor job of telling/displaying/proving that thoroughness.
If you start it from within Windows, it reboots and defrags using some OS other than Windows [not sure if its DOS or linux]
Then it boots back into Windows when defrag is complete.
Better methinks, to make the "Recovery Media" [CD], and boot that, and use the program that provides.

(c) I would then normally use "O&O Defrag 2000" freeware version [run within Windows] to give a good display of the results of the defrag.

[jlreich]

I use Defraggler (http://www.defraggler.com/)from the makers of CCleaner. It does a well enough job and you can set a schedule to run automatically for each drive. It's free and works in XP and vista, assuming it works in 7 but haven't tried it.

[Paul Komski]

I have said it before I know, but I really don't understand the need to (what it seems can become almost an obsession) keep NTFS volumes defragmented on a tight schedule. I can't remember a time that I saw a noticeable performance boost from defragmenting any partitions that were not already over-full and I am always aware that such clean-ups make any later data recovery (if ever needed) less successful.