What is the best FREE Defragger?

UsernameIssues · 06 Apr 2012

wanchoo said:

I fully agree with this observation. Puran is the best among the dozen or so free and shareware defragmenters that I have used.

EzioAuditore said:

I personally like Puran Defrag, has some nice features such as boot-time defrag, shutdown after defrag, reboot after defrag etc.

In case anyone wants to use the windows default defragger, then Ztruker's solution is the way to go.

Does the whole prefetch - layout.ini file not matter to you?

kado897 · 06 Apr 2012

Ztruker said:

Put defrag in a .bat file and add a shutdown /t 0, then when defrag finishes, the computer will shutdown.

DefragAndShutdown.bat

C:\Windows\System32\defrag.exe
shutdown /t 0 /c "Shutdown after defrag completed"

Place an shortcut to the .bat file anywhere you want it then when you click on it, the defrag will start and when it completes the system will shutdown.

Edit: Enter defrag /? from a Command Prompt to see the options available.

One option that does not appear when you do that is boot optimization.

defrag c: /boot will perform boot optimization and defrag C:

You need to run it in an elevated command prompt.

wanchoo · 06 Apr 2012

I keep prefetch off except for the boot files that are required by prefetch.

UsernameIssues said:

Does the whole prefetch - layout.ini file not matter to you?

UsernameIssues · 06 Apr 2012

Thanks for clarifying. Hopefully the OP understands some the choices being made by the software being recommended.

Ztruker · 07 Apr 2012

I use Defraggler and as far as I know have never lost a restore point.

kado897 · 07 Apr 2012

I haven't used Defragler for some time now but it depends what options you use. If you just do a quick defrag then you won't lose many, if any. If however you do the full thing and fill gaps then you are likely to lose a lot. It also depends what your cluster size is, If you have 16k clusters then you won't lose RPs. Don't ask me why I picked that up off the Defraggler forum when I first noticed the issue.

gregrocker · 07 Apr 2012

I like Puran free version which has a boot-time defrag that gets at System files which otherwise are running. It also allows you to schedule a Disk Check with the boot defrag which his convenient and thorough.

On the Additional Operations tab you can enable Intelligent Optimizer which will position most-used files so they are more readily accessible and results in performance improvements especially on older hardware.

A Guy · 08 Apr 2012

I use Auslogics Disk Defrag since I only defrag my Data HDD. When I had the OS on a HDD, I used Puran. A Guy