[Curious D]

I use XP's defragmenter to defragment my laptop hard drive, but it doesn't optimize the hard drive (defragmenting free space). Does anyone know of a fast, reliable, efficient defragmenter that also optimizes the hard drive? Thanks.

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the only decent ones are for the Mac Platform. when it comes to free space, there isn't really anything to defrag. Its freespace. so if your file structure shows up under the defrag tool as lots of lines scattered all over the place then its possible that you don't have enough free space for it to defrag optimally. Defrag requires about 15% free space before it can optimally defrag.

[starjax]

the only decent ones are for the Mac Platform. when it comes to free space, there isn't really anything to defrag. Its freespace. so if your file structure shows up under the defrag tool as lots of lines scattered all over the place then its possible that you don't have enough free space for it to defrag optimally. Defrag requires about 15% free space before it can optimally defrag.

[Curious D]

Thanks for the input. On Norton Systemworks (which I previously owned), there was an ability to optimize the hard drive. It would move all data so that free space was continguous (at least graphically). It was stated that this would help optimize data retrieval as well as reduce fragmentation of new data. Is there any true benefit from "optimizing" hard drives by this mean? Thanks.

[starjax]

explainging that gets highly technical. if ms had gone and liscened norton's technology like they did in earlier versions of windows, then I would love to use norton again. however, as it stands currently, windows xp handles the fat allowacation differently than norton so they fight each other.

[starjax]

ok, reread your question. yes keeping your drive optimized helps in boot times, and the spead of disk intensive applications. back with windows 9x and 2k we would say that at 7% fragmentation you would see some benifit from defraging. at 15% fragmentation we would make you wait till the system was defraged. we did this because at some point the fat will just corrupt and data loss and data errors (checkdisk has to be run to fix these) will occur.

General rule of thumb. Run scandisk and defrag once per month is the best preventative maintenance that you can do. Now I defrag my primary drive a bit more, but thats because I use disk intensive applications.

want to schedele a defrag to be run? Just use task scheduler to setup the task. point to c:\windows\system32\defrag.exe