Windows 7: Defraging

Well, I guess there are more than one answer to this question. I have used Defraggler for a long time and prefer it.
But, after what I refer to as "wasting" about 5 hours, it went from 10% fragmented to about the same. It could not defragment C:/System Volume Information/ entirely.
I have it scheduled to run every night at 2 AM and 10% is what I first saw.



I noticed you gave a +1 to Auslogics program, so I downloaded and ran it. It said 0% fragmentation after I ran it..
But as you can see from this pic, it is not really totally defragmented.



As you can see there are immovable files that are of course fragmented and towards the end there are several "green" non-fragmented files. However, when I think of defragmented, I see all of the files together at the top with white every where else.
So, defraggler says it is still not defragmented and auslogics does...
I don't know what to make of this info.

Those would be System restore Points/ Page File / Hiberfile and possibly a few TEMP files in use. they can not be defragmented while windows is running.

I do not know if that defragmenter has the ability to do offline "system" defrags or not. If so, it should be able to defragment these files before starting Windows.

If not & it bugs you, an alternative you can try (but will be more work):
Do a disk clean up
Delete hyberfile (if you do not hibernate your system)
Delete all system restore points. (may want to leave most current one up to you)
Disable pagefile.
Reboot
Defrag.

When done, Re-enable Pagefile. reboot if needed ( I would make it same min and max)
Re-enable system restore and create restore point.


Going this route will place the PAGEFILE at the end of the defragmented files when it recreated, in one piece.

Thanks for this information! I can live with it the way it is I guess. I will keep this in case I ever need to shrink the drive.
Just curious, but a while back I needed to use a restore point and there was only 2 or 3 and I expected many, many more.
Can you tell me what deletes restore points besides manually deleting them (above) and the FSUTIL command (it did on Vista, not sure about windows 7). I never seem to see more than a couple restore points, yet I have reserved enough room for plenty and when an update occurs, I see that it creates a restore point.
Thanks!

Manually:
Turning System restore off, or off and back on, will delete ALL restore points.

Using windows built in disk clean up, under More Options tab, & Clean up System Restore/Shadow Copies ...
Deletes all restore points except the most current one.

Automatically: It deletes the oldst on its own, when space is low (the space you allow for restore points)

It should create restore points however, everytime you install something.

I run CCleaner a lot, could that do it? because I haven't turned it off and
I don't use disk cleanup since I use CCleaner. I know I have enough space
allocated, but I only see a couple when I have needed them.
Thanks!

As far as I am aware, NO. im fairly certain CCleaner only deletes temp. junk, thumbnails etc ..

I could be mistaken though

I've found that there are a couple of things that you can do to reduce the fragmentation of those system files that refuse to defragment:

1. Take a note from Linux. Create a partition just for the pagefile and hibernation file (if you need the hibernation file). Separating these files from the main partition keeps other files from fragmenting around them. If you have multiple physical hard drives placing those system files on a separate hard drive can possibly increase performance since the system won't have to contend with another program accessing the disk at the same time the system wants to access the pagefile. Placing the pagefile on a separate hard drive will only grant performance benefits if your system has to do a lot of caching in which case, you probably need more ram.

2. To minimize the fragmentation of the pagefile, specify a specific size and not just a min and max range. Specifying the size creates the whole file all at once so that it doesn't fragment itself as it expands and shrinks. If you specify a size make sure that it is big enough. I think most recommendations I've seen is 1.5 times the amount of ram you have. However with my 4GB of ram I rarely see my pagefile usage get much past 1GB. Also something else to note, if you are running 32-bit Windows you will only be able to use a total of about 3.5 GB whether that 3.5GB is in ram or pagefile or both. For example if you have 2GB of ram running 32-bit Windows your pagefile can't get past 1.5 GB in size because Windows can't address past that. 64bit doesn't have that limitation.

Thanks! I'll keep this in mind. I already dual boot with Ubuntu and have
used up the 4 partitions for the HD so I could only make a logical. But, I think I am fine right now.
This PC is still fast as lightening as far as I am concerned.

Being a large fan of everything open source I've turned to Ultra Defrag and I find it works better than the built in Windows 7 Defrag but I haven't tried Auslogic's yet

Raxco Perfect disk will give the results you're after,by far best defragger imo and i've tried them all