Whenever you defrag your hard drive (using the tool which ships with Windows), you might notice there is a big green block which not movable. For the most part this green block is your Windows page file. Typically the way to make sure this gets defragged is to simply “delete it” by (steps abbreviated) removing the page file, defragging the hard drive and then re-setup the page file. Instead of this workaround, defrag the page file directly by using Sysinternals PageDefrag tool.
This free tool does just what you think, defrags your page file:
PageDefrag uses advanced techniques to provide you what commercial defragmenters cannot: the ability for you to see how fragmented your paging files and Registry hives are, and to defragment them. In addition, it defragments event log files and Windows 2000/XP hibernation files (where system memory is saved when you hibernate a laptop).
This tool is ideal to run on a fairly regular basis to prevent your virtual memory and registry information from becoming too jumbled.
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Sharron said:
7/19/2008 10:16 am
I’m an XP user and having had a taste of Vista I decided to stay with XP: Hence I don’t know whether or not the following programs’ functions are catered for by default in Vista, though I suspect not.
Worth mentioning, with this in mind, are another two freeware programs; those being NTRegOpt and Erunt. http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
These two download in a single package: Erunt creates a backup of your system registry including open hives at startup and saves it to your a file in user account where it can be accessed from the command prompt in the Recovery Console.
NTRegOpt optimises the open hives of yout NT registry that most defragmenters can’t get at by defragmaning and compacting.
Another point worth mentioning is that if you use Diskeeper (2007 or 2008) there is a boot-time runonce defragmentation option available from the program’s GUI which also defragments your MFT in addition to paging file.
Also in Diskeeeper is an option to pad out your MFT. (This is done manually with Diskeeper 2007 and automatically by Diskeeper 2008.) What this means is that when windows if first installed it creates a master file table with enough space for x many entries: This isn’t always large enough; and as the disk fills up it can cause the MFT to fragment causing system instability. Diskeeper resizes the MFT based upon an approximation of the expected number of files plus some, calculated by a complicated algorithm. This avoids MFT fragmentation as the disk fills up.
[Reply]
Drew said:
7/19/2008 12:24 pm
Great post! I’ve been using Page Defrag since about a month after it came out and love it. It increases a slight amount to your systems boot time while it does the defrag but only around 10-15 seconds, pending your PC speed.
It’s a great little tool and works great IMO
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