defrag free space

[lacywest]

Subject closed due to lack of interest

[BobK]

I just use the WinXP Disk Defragmenter.

The free space is already free- the only way to squish the free space all together is to move the files that are scattered throughout the free space- that's what defragging is.

Or you could delete files. If you have a drive being used for nothing but capturing then don't have anything else on that drive. Capture, do whatever you're going to do with the captured files and delete them- no defragging required.

[lacywest]

Subject closed due to lack of interest

[PhreakPhish]

VoptXP v7 removed 7 gigs from my 120 gig comp. after the 30 day trail i cant use it anymore -=[
wish there was something as good as that prog - i used winxp first then that - that works so much better and has soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo many extra features in it - i wish there was another freeware prog like it

[redwudz]

In my opinion, the XP program works as good as any other. Some files can't be moved, but unless you have a whole lot of programs, it should move most of them to the 'bottom' of your drive and give you a large open space, at least as large as you have room left on the drive. The boot drive is the one that benefits most from defragging as there are many small files added and deleted often. I don't defrag my RAID0 video drive but maybe 3 or 4 times a year as it only has large files and rarely needs it.

[lacywest]

Subject closed due to lack of interest

[steptoe]

I use Raxco PerfectDisk 6, used to use Norton, but I found PerfectDisk is faster and also has the option to defrag when you're not doing anything and also can defrag when a set limit is reached, so it will only do it when things start getting bad

Also, as you can do a boot-time defrag if you wish, you don't have the problem of the crap XP defrag stopping everytime something writes to a drive, or worrying if you've stopped all the tasks that may write to a drive, casuing it to restart once again

Plus the usual schedule option of doing a regular defrag at say 3am, every week, month, year

Defragging my entire system of 14 partitions across 3 hard drives !!, takes about 3-4 hours using maximum defrag and a free space defrag. Norton took forever to do that and then whinged it couldn't quite manage it due to not enough free space if things were getting tight

One hard drive is 120GB, with about 50GB used, and it flys through that, and its used constantly, with temp files (copying, deleting, moving, etc, etc), so has a lot of work to keep it nice and neat

[Tommyknocker]

I use MS defrag myself. Well, I scheduled Windows to use it, that is. It does it while I sleep.

[proxyx99]

If you use NTFS most defrag progs do about the same. Default winXP defrag - Diskkeeper-based actually does a better job pulling files together and "opening up" free space then Norton. I tried several disc util. before. Some time ago, as I recall, everyone who wanted to use a "better" tool was after Diskkeeper. Now, it is a part of WinXP... but search still continues...(?). Maybe a PerfectDisk is your solution. Keep in mind that your PC will never write files in a contiguous way (as per today's knowledge) so there is no point in constant realigning your files. As I said Diskkeeper (default dafrag in WinXP) is an excellent one. Large files like MPEG are written quite sequentially so if you avoid writing them to your OS part. (C you won't even have a need to defrag them in the future. Have couple dedicated part. for large files and you will be amazed how nicely your files will be placed on them.

[jimmalenko]

Before I installed WINXP ... I could use Norton and just free up ... my free space and squish it all up to the top.

Is there any programs that will free up just the free space without moving all my files.

When Norton squishes it all up to the top, isn't this moving the files ? Your free space is free already.

Anyway...

Let me get this straight...

You have 6 volumes - Are they all the 1 HD ?
Delete is not an option - Do you have other stuff on that partition you wish to keep ?

[BobK]

> If you dont know of a program that can do this ... you don't need to answer.

I never "need" to answer anything. But I did. If you don't like the answer, ignore it.

And I'd still like to know how you expect any program to move all your free space together without moving any files. But if you don't know then you don't need to answer.

[lacywest]

Subject closed due to lack of interest

[handyguy]

Some say NTSF doesn't need defragging.

Also very important is to defrag & clean your registry. It gets bloated with free space.

[Tommyknocker]

How does one clean one's registy?

[lacywest]

Subject closed due to lack of interest

[jimmalenko]

QUESTION:

Is there any programs that will free up just the free space without moving all my files.

ANSWER:

I guess none of you used or remember ... that Norton Speed Disk could just only ... move all the files regardless of the order they were in and create one very large "free space".

"I don't want to move my files but I used to be able to use a utility that, you know, moved my files..."

[proxyx99]

Instead of "subject closed" I'd rather post "Thanks to all who wasted their time dealing with my issue" if I were you. But that's just me...

[thecoalman]

What's the deal with all the edits? I find the information on boards like this invaluable, sometimes on posts that are quite old. Why edit your posts? Hard to decipher information when half the thread has been buthchered.