Disk Defragmenter
 

The Disk Keeper Lite that came with my pre-installed Windows XP Pro gave up the ghost recently. The "fix" option offered in control panel when remove or change this software is selected has not helped. My memory is that this occurred very shortly after installing a set of patches from Microsoft for XP.

There is no other de-fragger installed as a part of Windows.

In any case, can someone recommend a good - preferably inexpensive - disk defragger?

Thanks in advance!

jkdefrag is free, open source, etc and seems to work very well for me.

http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/

defraggler
 

I've read some good stuff about defraggler ('though I can't remember where).

Use the Windows defragger.

Don't waste money or time on defragging.

I've never seen the need to defrag more than annually. Defrag software is one step above "registry cleaners" when it comes to modern-day snake oil.

Cdma: Thanks for that interesting article. I hadn't realised.

I'll second this. Much faster than the default one in windows. Take 5 mins and read the notes.

I disagree with the 'never seen the need to defrag more than annually' statement. Especially on a laptop where you're running out of HD space, defrag your swap file and hibernate file (see jkdefrag notes) and you'll notice a difference.

In this situation you shouldn't be defragging. You should be hard drive shopping or clearing out unneeded files.

The more frequently you defrag the shorter it takes. So my advice has been run the defrag task on a schedule. Third party defraggers may have better heuristics that allows it to finish in less time than Window's built-in defragger, but if they are scheduled to run at middle of night, it has negligible impact on your productivity.

Vista's defragger runs weekly by default, so you should not need to tweak anything. XP's defragger is not scheduled to run automatically, but it's simple enough to create a scheduled task for it.

Disk keeper
 

I have used Diskkeeper for many years and been very happy with it.

(emphasis mine)
It will also have a negligible impact on your productivity if you just skip it. Unless your HD is very full and you are frequently moving large amounts of data on and off the drive the fragmentation isn't really a problem at all.

It depends...if a key file you're using regularly gets very fragmented, it can have an impact. A couple of months ago, I had a ~30MB Excel sheet that I was spending a lot of time with. Every time it would autosave, Excel was non-responsive for 20-30 seconds. Seriously annoying when you're "in the zone".

I ran a defrag and found that that one file was the most fragmented on the disk (about 300 fragments, IIRC). Defragging it made the autosave time negligible.

Thanks all for the discussion and the links.

I do move a lot of data on and off my computer HD and several external drives as well. Sound files of lectures, videos of hour long demonstrations, and other educational videos that I have ripped or downloaded.

I downloaded the jkdefrag and have run it once. Much to my surprise it just went through all 4 or 5 drives that were attached to my laptop at one go.

So far, so good!

If you let it go that long, the Windows defragger won't run anyway. Your disk will be too fragmented. Running windows defrag also optimizes frequently used files. With regular use after some time you should see quicker startup of programs you use all the time.

I think there is a misunderstanding here. Defragging on a schedule when the computer is not in use means the user will not need to wait for defrag to finish, or suffer through slow computer performance while defrag runs in background.

bdjohns1's anecdote is a good example on how defrag improves the performance and productivity. While modern SATA2 drives have some performance enhancing features like NCQ, it is still takes many orders of magnitude longer than reading contiguous sectors.

Windows defrag will not run if there is less than 15% space free, but it can be overridden. It will also skip files over 64MB large, this can be overridden as well. Run defrag.exe -? and it will tell you all the options.

This is one solution, another is just to "Save As..." to a new file and it will save it as a single fragment. If you want to get quick results without doing the whole defrag thing that can be a good option.