Utilities speed defrag
OK, you can stop now. I knew all along that Windows NT 4 did not include a defragmentation utility (see "How to Defrag" newsletter from two weeks ago). What I forgot was the order in which Windows operating systems were released (for some reason, that day I thought NT 4 preceded Win 95. So sue me.)
What a number of you have pointed out, though, is that there are third-party utilities which will defrag a Win 2000 drive faster - and more safely - than the built-in utility.
SysInternals’s freeware PageDefrag utility does what the built-in Win 2000 defragger can't - it defragments the paging file and registry hives. You'll still need to reboot (once), but you won't have to go through multiple resizing of the paging file. The downside is that this utility only works on the paging and registry files - you'll need to first run the built-in defrag utility to be sure there's enough contiguous space available for PageDefrag to run. But that's a small price to pay (you should be doing it anyway) for this excellent, single-purpose utility.
Win 2000's built-in defragger is based on the award winning Diskeeper utility from Executive Software (http://www.executive.com) - so if you want a utility that works like the built-in one, but has more features, then go to the source. Diskeeper 6 (the latest version) even includes scheduling (so you can have the system defragged during off hours) or on-demand (the system will automatically tell you when its time to defrag). At installation, Diskeeper will check the Master File Table and the Paging file and defrag them as needed. After that, the exclusive "Frag Guard" feature actually keeps these important files from becoming fragmented.
So there you have it. For the price, you can't beat PageDefrag when used in conjunction with the built-in Win 2000 defragging utility. For features, you'll want to check out Executive Software's Diskeeper 6. You can do it yourself, or buy all the bells and whistles - but the most important thing to remember is to keep your system defragmented for best performance.
» posted by ITworld staff
Network World
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