Faster Windows Defragement

Defragmenting your hard drive is one of the simplest and free ways to prevent performance slippage on your computer.  And while there are excellent tools available such as Diskkeeper which can automate the process, the built in Microsoft Windows Disk Defragmenting Tool (which incidentally is made by the same people at Diskkeeper, but just a “lite” version), can do a great job as well. There are (at least) two things which make the Windows Defrag tool unlikable: First, you must manually run the tool, unless you want to involve some sort of scripting, which is possible; and Second, it is much slower than the commerical tools available.

Today I’m going to point out one way to speed up your disk defragmentation task. And it is so simple, and obvious, your likely going to be wondering why you didn’t think of it sooner:

Reboot your system before performing a disk defragmentation.

There are a couple of reasons why this works:

1) The paging file is flushed during a reboot;

2) The paging file is set back to the default size (which may grow larger over time); and

3) There should be less background tasks, which may rob memory, CPU, and disk I/O from your defragmentation process.

Enjoy!