Set Windows XP to automatically defragment your hard drive

Posted on July 28, 2008 at 5:23 am

One of the cool features of Windows Vista is the ability to schedule it to automatically defragment your hard drive on a regular basis. This feature is actually turned on by default, but you can easily change the schedule to your liking.

XP however does not have the Defragment utility enabled by default. We can make a few settings changes with the Scheduled Tasks utility to achieve the same thing.

Open up a new Scheduled Task by navigating Start >> Settings >> Control Panel >> Scheduled Tasks. This will open the Scheduled Task Wizard, just hit the Next button.

Next click on the Browse button and navigate to Windows >> System32 and double click dfrg or defrag.exe (you will only see defrag.exe if you have ‘hide extensions for known file types’ unchecked in folder options).

Next just basically follow the Scheduled Task Wizard which will ask you to schedule specific times for the defrag to occur.

You will need to enter in your username and password if you have one. Once you are done with the Wizard simply set it and forget it. XP will do the rest and automatically defragment your hard drive.

Written by Mysticgeek who is also a contributing author at How-To Geek.

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Comments

2 Responses to “Set Windows XP to automatically defragment your hard drive”

Marty said on : July 29th, 2008 at 12:06 am

If your local or domain accounts have passwords that expire, use the built-in system account instead. Use “NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM” as the user name and leave the password blank.

Defragment a single file using FragExt Says:

[...] If you are constantly copying, moving or deleting large files on computer, such as videos or movies, then you should probably read my article on how to automatically defragment your hard drive. [...]
December 1st, 2008 at 5:17 am