Manual Defrag

Author: Dave
Date: 08.20.15 - 5:03pm

Interesting tip of the day

System started running like hell after some big downloads and zip extractions. Ram and CPU was fine. My drive was completely fragged and anything I did after dealing with that data got fragged as well. (like email archive and browser db)

So ok, time to defrag..leave it for the night all better, but I dont have the night..I need it fixed up asap for a task. So is there a way to manually defrag your drive and get stuff running better?

The answer is yes. It also lets you take some shortcuts.

In XP, bring up the disk defragmenter and click analyze. Once its done, you can click report to the top xx files that are scattered all over your drive.

To speed things up, you can delete any files you dont care about. If you ran the defragmenter itself, it would defrag them all.

To manually defrag the files, browse to the folder in explorer and just make a copy of the file. Once its complete, delete the original, rename the copy back to original name and you should be good.

If a certain app is being a jerk in this manner you can defrag just its files to get it back up and running again without requiring the overnight wait.

Handy tip in a pinch and can really speed things along by killing off highly fragged files you dont care about anyway.