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Disk Defragmenter Utility

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  3. Right click on one of the files and select Properties. The combined size of the selected files is displayed.

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When files are created, deleted, or modified on your hard drive, they are not necessarily stored contiguously. Windows' file system will try to store the file all in one piece but this is often impossible, so it often stores pieces of a file in two or more places on the surface of the drive. This leads to what is called disk fragmentation. As you could imagine, when it comes time to read that file back into RAM (Random Access Memory), it takes longer than it would if the file were all in one place.

The Windows Disk Defragmenter Utility is designed to reorganize noncontiguous files into contiguous files and optimize their placement on the hard drive for increased reliability and performance.

Accessing Disk Defragmenter

Disk Defragmenter can be opened as follows:

1. Click Start
2. Click All Programs
3. Click Accessories
4. Click System Tools
5. Click Disk Defragmenter

When Disk Defragmenter first opens you'll see a list of the hard drives displayed at the top of the screen. The Estimated Disk Usage Before Defragmentation and Estimated Disk Usage After Defragmentation will be blank until a drive is selected and the Analyze button is clicked.

After the Analyze button has been clicked and the process completes a window opens with a brief recommendation of what action Disk Defragmenter thinks should be taken regarding the drive. It's important to note that this is just a recommendation based on the percentage of fragmented files to total files and doesn't prevent the drive from being defragmented if you feel it needs to be done and might improve system performance. If you want to go ahead and defragment without more information, click the Defragment button. Click the View Report button to view a more detailed drive analysis.

An Analysis Report contains quite a bit of additional information about the selected drive. For example, the report tells you the number of fragmented files on that drive and the Average Fragments Per File. When this number reaches 1.05, Defragmenter will normally recommend that you defrag the drive. The report also lists the files in descending order that are the most fragmented.

After the defragmentation process completes, clicking the View Report button will bring up the Defragmentation Report. It takes the exact same form as the Analysis Report but shows the post defragmentation results. The Total Files and Average File Size remain identical, but notice that Total Fragmented Files and Total Excess Fragments have been reduced to zero (0) and the Average Fragments Per File is now 1.00, indicating most or all of the files are contiguous. In addition, there are no files listed that did not defragment.

For the majority of users, the Disk Defragmenter Utility included with XP is sufficient to keep the hard drives in relatively good condition, but it's actually what is known as a Lite or slightly crippled version of Diskeeper, a product made by Executive Software.

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