Windows XP Auto Defrag 2

[cool4242]

Hi,

I have a curious question. Yesterday I left my computer on for about 15 minutes. When I came back, the harddrive activity light was going crazy. I had nothing running on the PC so I got a little concerned. I used cntrl+alt+delete to look at the current processes and saw that dfragfat.exe was running (This is the disk defragment program). When I started using the computer the service stopped by iteself. I rebooted the computer and left it alone for a bit to see if the service starts again, and it did. When I moved the mouse, the service automatically stopped again. Does anyone know whats going on? My harddrive does not need to be defragged because I defragged it last night and the defrag service still comes on by itself.

Thanks

 

[bcastner]

If you have a filestore of FAT32 and you have indexing enabled, this is a normal process during system idle time.

 

[cool4242]

Oh IC. I do have a FAT32 file system and Indexing service enabled. Thanks a lot

 

[arlems]

Also, if you are using the full version of Disk Defragmenter and have "smart scheduling enable", the program will start running after the user hasn't used his computer for some time. As soon as he starts using his PC, the defrag program pauses.

 

[cool4242]

Ho do i check if smart scheduling is on? And how do I know if I have full version of Disk Defrag. I have windows XP Pro

 

[bcastner]

You would have to buy Diskeeper Workstation to have the "full" version.

You can check Scheduled Tasks through Control Panel.

 

[Jontmke]

bcastner: I saw somewhere a check box that says to the effect: "Let Windows rearrange files for better performance when idle". Was that in Diskkeeper? I don't think so. In the advanced performance settings?

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[bcastner]

The setting you mention is straight XP. Microsoft licensed the Diskeeper "lite" version to make the defragmentation utlities native to XP.

You can purchase more feature rich editions for both the Workstation and Server if you need additional features.

 

[weogarth]

Would pushing files to the beginnging of the drive, not merely defragging them, be one of the items in the 'more feature rich' versions mentioned above?

Also, on a 60-80GB drive size, how much benefit would doing that gain you in disk access time? I've never really seen anything quantifying that even in general terms.

 

[bcastner]

Strangely enough, XP does try to push the "Most Recently Used" files toward the faster outer rings of the drive. It certainly tries to do this with its candiates for the Prefetch folder, and this process can be, at least for these prefetch items, more directly asked to be optomized for their drive placement using the Microsoft Bootvis.exe program.

If you are using the fat32 filestore there are more options with defragging utilities as a general rule, as NFTS volumes are generally not tightly defragged or packed. I have not really studied Diskeeper Workstation, and there is a new Version out, so I cannot really speak to whether it offers a file relocation feature. O & O which I have used does offer this. I tend to use Vopt for XP any my defragging is a rather irregular chore.

Note: the fastest way to speed up your drives is to keep XP from reading from them. This means giving it enough RAM to have a suitably sized disk cache.