XP/Home defragmenter - useless?

[Evo]

I've been called in to fix up a relative's XP/Home PC, which is reasonably modern but has recently started to run very slowly. The machine was clean (Windows Update, NAV and SpyBot all up to date so that lecture must have worked ), but starting anything up led to long waits and lots of disk activity.

I think the problem is the fairly small hard disk (14 gigs), which was almost full (about 200Mb free) and heavily fragmented, with XP's defragger almost completely red - I guess the OS has been squeezing files in where it can find space for a while, and now everything is badly mixed together. There's also a fair bit of swapping going on, as the machine has only got 128Mb installed, and I guess the page file is also heavily fragmented. Sounds like a resonable reason for slowdown? I know more memory would help, but it's not just a lack of memory problem, performance has been fine for their needs until now. Apart from fragmentation I can't find anything else wrong with it...

Now I know defraggers are useless without some space to play with, so I spent some time cleaning up and now there's about 5 Gig free, a bit over a third of the disk. Still, the XP defragger seems completely unable to do anything about the file fragmentation - it has a half-hearted attempt to clean up, but when it finishes the disk is still all red. Now, the disk is formatted NTFS and I remember in the days of NT4 that the hard disk could get so fragmented that Windows couldn't fix it. Two versions of Windows later, has anything changed? Or is the defragger still basically useless?

Sorry, a rather long post for a very simple question

[E-Liam]

Hi Evo,

Try this...

http://www.webattack.com/get/dkeeperlite.shtml

It might need a couple of runs if it's as bad as you say, but I use it myself and it works.. and it's free..

Cheers

Liam

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Evo,

With a Hard Drive that is about full and only 128Mb of RAM, it does not matter if the Hard Drive is fragmented or not, it is going to be extremely slow.

Still the best option is adding enough RAM to get the machine to stop accessing the Hard Drive's Swap File. In most cases 512Mb of RAM is enough.

If you want Defrag to work, you should try either Safe Mode, or turn off all the extra processes in Normal Mode, including Anti Virus and Screen Saver, before running Defrag.

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. It would be worth running HJT! on it too. Thanx to Liam, I have found that program to be very useful.

[Evo]

Liam

I'd forgotten about that (used to use it myself a few years ago). However, it seems that this disk is beyond Diskkeeper as well - i've run it maybe a dozen times, and it still reports the disk as being heavily fragmented. The number of fragmented files is hardly changing too, the total is dropping by less than 1% per run, so I think the whole thing's in a mess. Backup, format and reinstall looks like the best bet...

Richard - HJT is clean. I have put in an extra 256Mb stick while I work on the machine so there's much less swapping going on but load times are still painful. Nothing wrong with the disk as far as I can tell (manufacturer has a disk-test utility which reports all is ok).

All a bit of a quandary, really. I have a very similar machine at home, and even while missing half its memory (that's where the 256Mb stick came from) it's far faster. And, apart from chronic fragmentation, I can't really see why there's a difference

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Evo,

That and it could be a very slow Hard Drive (if it is that size, it is pretty old). Windows is all about Disk Access.

Take Care,

Richard