Defrag pagefile and registry in Windows XP

Posted on October 4, 2008 at 5:23 am

If you’re run the default Defragmenter program in Windows recently, you may have not realized that the program cannot defrag any file that is currently open, which includes all system files, the Windows page file, and the Windows registry.

However, if you truly want to optimize the speed and performance of your computer, defragging those three aspects of the operating system are the most important! If you think about it, the system files, the page file and the registry are constantly being accessed by Windows in order to complete any task.

So if Windows does not allow you to defrag these areas, then how do you go about doing it? Well, Microsoft has a free product called PageDefrag that will defrag your computer during the system boot up so as to avoid any files being locked up by Windows.

pagedefrag

The program will even defrag your event logs! The list shows how fragmented the paging file is and all of the various registry hives (SAM, Software, System, etc).

Choose Defragment at next boot and then restart your computer. First CHKDSK will make sure there are no errors on your hard drive and then the defragment process will begin.

defragment paging file

Overall, the program is very useful for increasing the smoothness and speed of your computer. I would recommended only running it once every month or two, not on every boot. Too much defragmenting can actually cause more problems.

There are also other freeware applications that do a great job of defragmenting your hard drive, such as SmartDefrag, a tool that lets you defrag multiple drives at once. Enjoy!

» Filed Under Free Software Downloads

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Comments

9 Responses to “Defrag pagefile and registry in Windows XP”

  1. Larry Miller said on : November 28th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

    There should be no need to do this after the initial use. The pagefile is not like other files and does not normally grow and shrink to fit the data it contains. If the initial size is sufficient then no fragmentation will occur. If warnings occur then the initial size should be increased. If this is done then a further run of Pagedefrag will be necessary. Be sure to do a normal defrag first as Pagedefrag cannot work properly on a fragmented drive.

    Larry Miller
    Microsoft MCSA


  2. Tony said on : March 7th, 2009 at 11:55 am

    Sounds like this is something I could use after 2 1/2 years of adding/deleting stuff.


  3. Deyaa Addeen Fahmy Shedeed said on : March 19th, 2009 at 5:09 pm

    Thanks.


  4. Florian said on : April 16th, 2009 at 2:38 pm

    I run WIn Vista basic.

    Have just downloaded & unzipped to my hd.

    When double clicked, I get following error message:

    Error extracting Pagedefrag driver to drivers directory.

    Any idea what is wrong?
    thanks


  5. Gnome said on : May 16th, 2009 at 5:59 am

    >> Any idea what is wrong?

    PageDefrag doesn’t work on Vista (only 2000/XP).


  6. Xander said on : May 23rd, 2009 at 1:29 am

    Florian — check the header of this page…
    “…IN WINDOWS XP”

    PageDefrag doesn’t work in Vista.

    It’s a great program. I put it on all my customers’ XP systems.


  7. Brian said on : July 5th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

    Florian, this site may be of help to you:

    http://forum.sysinternals.com/.....?TID=10755

    Also, PageDefrag, to my knowledge, currently does not have a Vista version that is runnable. I wish you well in your attempts to install it, I did exactly as the person on the forums said to, and it gives me basically the same error. Running as an administrator wouldn’t help at all either (I suppose that’s due to the UAC being off).


  8. someone said on : January 29th, 2010 at 8:25 pm

    defragmentation is useless. it wont boost your machine’s speed in any relevant way.

    Just dont listen to the 10000000 posts of noobs, who say how importaint defragmenting is. the speed gain doesnt justify the damage done to your hdds while defragmenting – not to speak the time it takes.

    normal users dont ever need to defrag their drives! the two things, you would actually need to do: shrinking the MFT on ntfs cannot be done by normal users.

    so if you are not a professional, just stick with shutting down useless services. this is the only thing to boost your system.

    Also get brain 1.0 and you wont need to have an antivirus-software running all the time – just check the files, you beleave to have a chance of being contaminated.
    Antivirus-software is one of the most ressource consuming things one can have on his machine.


  9. someone said on : January 29th, 2010 at 8:28 pm

    also consider setting a fixed pagefile size.
    which will cause the system not to take up more space than needed.

    max. pagefilesize = ram/2;

    there is no need to give the system more than that. actually it would be pretty dumb to make the pagefile larger. just google around and get a wiev of how fucked microsoft’s memorymanagement really is ;)


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