Re: defrag hard drive

Pegasus

The Disk Defragmenter provided with Windows is perfectly adequate.

Some ways to create more free disk space.

It is likely that an allocation of 12% has been made to System Restore
on your C partition which is over generous. I would reduce it to 700
mb. Right click your My Computer icon on the Desktop and select System
Restore. Place the cursor on your C drive select Settings but this
time find the slider and drag it to the left until it reads 700 mb and
exit. When you get to the Settings screen click on Apply and OK and
exit.

Another default setting on a large drive which could be wasteful is
that for temporary internet files especially if you do not store
offline copies on disk. The default allocation is 3% of drive.
Depending on your attitude to offline copies you could reduce this to
1% or 2%. In Internet Explorer select Tools, Internet Options,
General, Temporary Internet Files, Settings to make the change. At the
same time look at the number of days history is held.

The default allocation for the Recycle Bin is 10 % of drive. Change to
5%, which should be sufficient. In Windows Explorer place the cursor
on your Recycle Bin, right click and select Properties, Global and
move the slider from 10% to 5%. However, try to avoid letting it get
too full as if it is full and you delete a file by mistake it will
bypass the Recycle Bin and be gone for ever.


If your C drive is formatted as NTFS another potential gain arises
with your operating system on your C drive. In the Windows Directory
of your C partition you will have some Uninstall folders in your
Windows folder typically: $NtServicePackUninstall$ and
$NtUninstallKB282010$ etc. These files may be compressed or not
compressed. If compressed the text of the folder name appears in blue
characters. If not compressed you can compress them. Right click on
each folder and select Properties, General, Advanced and check the box
before Compress contents to save Disk Space. On the General Tab you
can see the amount gained by deducting the size on disk from the size.
Folder compression is only an option on a NTFS formatted drive /
partition.

cCleaner is a useful tool if used with care. The main drawback with
Disk CleanUp in XP is the need to run it in each User Profile -this
is corrected in Vista. Also cCleaner does a more thorough job
removing detritus Disk Clean Up passes by e.g. the many zero byte
files produced by Outlook Express.


--

Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"pegasus" <arrheniushill@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:pegasus.2sms8z@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Don't know if you can recover much space if your drive is so maxed
out,
apart from deleting files. Only a defrag will not help you get back
non-existent disk space.

Normally I use ccleaner to delete the temp files and browser(s) cache.
Seems to do the job well, and I get back quite a bit of space at times
~
1-2 gigs on my 160 GB drive. But my drive is normally atleast 30 %
free.
If you need to defrag, get the free space down to atleast 15%.

The only programs I use for my HDD cleanup+defrag are ccleaner and
Diskeeper Pro. Both have worked great without any issues. Ccleaner
gets
rid of the junk, and Diskeeper does a quick defrag of the drive + MFT.
(Edited for clarity): I defrag the bootfiles only when I need to
reboot
the system for some other reason, which is not very often.


--
pegasus


.

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