Defragging system files

I have two machines here, both running Windows 2000 Professional, but set up by two different users (myself and my husband). When I defragment my hard drives, the only thing that shows up in green - identified as "system files" - is the swapfile. When I defragment my husband's machine, the C: drive is full of green files, scattered all over the place, so that the drive cannot be defragmented completely. I'd like to know why this is, and, even more importantly, I'd like to know how to defrag his drive more effectively. Anybody got any suggestions?

 

www.sysinternals.com and get pagefiledefrag.

 

PageDefrag doesn't seem to do anything at all. The "Help" file is confusing - it talks about the program doing something immediately after the system runs chkdisk on startup, and posting messages to the logon "Blue Screen ". My machine doesn't run chkdisk on startup, and it doesn't even offer me the choice to start in a DOS-like mode so I can run chkdisk manually. It also doesn't display any blue screens at all. (Yes, I really am running Win2K!)

I'm beginning to wonder whether PageDefrag works with disks formatted as FAT32, or if it only works with NTFS. My system uses FAT32 formatting. Anyway, I can't manage to get PageDefrag to do anything useful; what am I doing wrong here?

 

I'm not sure what is wrong. The app is certainly supposed to work with FAT as well as NTFS and if you start it then check the box to have it run at next boot time, it certainly should. I can't say first hand since I haven't run a FAT file system on any machine that could use NTFS.

I have used the app since early NT4 days and hadn't read the slightly confusing part about it running after chkdsk. It will run after chkdsk if you happen to be doing a chkdsk but has always done fine for me without needing a chkdsk session first. There may be a silent check being done by the OS that we just weren't aware of.

 

I started reading the help files for Win2K's defragmenter, and it mentioned (in a sort of buried way) that the system files only show up in green under NTFS. But my swapfile (which is set to a fixed size) shows up in green anyway.

I had PageDefrag show me the list of fragmented system files, then set it to run on next boot, and rebooted. When I ran PageDefrag again, it showed me the same list, unchanged, even when I refreshed everything. This indicates to me that it's not doing anything at all - or is it?

I am very confused, and I don't want to go ahead and run PageDefrag on the NTFS machine until I understand it better.

 

Well, all I can offer is that from personal experience on a large number of NT4 and Win2000 servers and workstations, I have not seen any problems as a result of running the app.

I ran it on XP-pro for a while after I started using the OS version but it never found any fragmentation and I later learned that the native defrag app with XP takes care of that even while the GUI is running so you don't need the 3rd party help.

 

My husband's machine got so messed up that I spent most of last night installing various utilities (like Spybot S&D, ZoneAlarm, AVG Anti-Virus) and running them, to clean up the mess. Among other things, it was infected with the TSCash (also known as sysupd.exe) spyware, which even Spybot can't remove - it required a bit of registry hacking in Safe Mode to get rid of it. But anyway...

I installed and ran PageDefrag on that NTFS machine, setting it to run on next reboot, and then rebooted. Sure enough, it ran, and it displayed various screens during the startup process. And it seems to have worked as advertised. But it doesn't appear to do anything at all on my FAT32 machine. Curious...

 

Interesting about the FAT32 problem. If you simply run the GUI to get a fragmentation report, so you see anything?

The attached picture (from their site) is typical of NTFS systems but there are some items that FAT32 wouldn't have.

As I said earlier, I've never run NT with FAT32 so can't say from experience that it is even supposed to work.

 

When I run PageDefrag on my (FAT32) machine, I get the same GUI, with the list of system files and registry "hives" that need defragging. But when I reboot, I see no signs of anything happening, and when I run PageDefrag again, it tells me that the same files still need defragging. I can only conclude that it just doesn't do anything on FAT32 systems. (It did, however, work precisely as advertised on the NTFS machine.)