On 15/11/2010, at 3:56am, Dale wrote: > ... > I have a niece that brought me her puter. It's a HP with windoze XP on it. > I want to defrag the hard drive but the one that comes with windoze won't > work. Is there a free defrag tool that is safe on windoze?
I would be more concerned why defrag itself (Start > Run `dfrg.msc`) isn't working. If it's refusing because there's filesystem corruption, then I would advise against using anything else! You need to be logged in as an administrator in order to run defrag. If you boot XP to safe mode then a user named Administrator will be shown amongst the logon icons, and that user has no password. Running defrag,exe at the command-line (Start > Run `cmd`; `defrag,exe /?`) might give an explanation. Running `chkdsk /?`, choosing the most aggressive options and then `chkdsk c:` will cause the disk to be checked for corruption (`fsck` equivalent) at the next reboot. Obviously you should take a backup before doing this, as occasionally filesystem corruption will be *really* bad. Ideally you will disable swap / pagefile before defragmenting and enable it again afterwards. You can boot from a PE boot CD and run defrag from that, but it doesn't really seem necessary. Also check that "compress files and folders" is disabled <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307987>. You're best to apply it to the whole drive (actually tick the box saying you DO want to compress files and folders), but when the dialog box comes up saying "shall I apply that to all sub-directories" tell it "no". Then go back to checkbox again, disable it, then when the dialog box comes up tell it "yes". That will crunch away for some time ensuring that compression is not being used at all. Because Windows XP launched a decade ago, when disks were much smaller, the option to compress files and folders is recommended in the Disk Cleanup Wizard, so this option may be set incorrectly, and it is worth checking. Stroller.
