Hard Disk Defrag?
 

Any good free defrag programs out there? I had the trial diskeeper which seemed to work well but it quit after 30 days unless buy it? I guess is there a good one even if I have to purchase it?

XP and above comes with a bundled one that's probably "good enough", and any OS built on a modern filesystem (one designed since the 70's, say) typically doesn't need to be defragged.

I suggest you find a registry compacter/defragger as well - I like "CCleaner" (used to be Crap Cleaner), which will also clean up dead/bad registry keys and badly de-installed software from brain-dead installers, as well as bin temporary files and adware cookies for you.

If you run Sysinternal's Process Monitor (Microsoft bought them for that and Process Explorer), you'd be astonished how dumb some of the programs are that read the same registry key 17 times a second - and you wondered why your computer was slow...

This one works really well. You can run it in the background and have it kick off when the PC has been idle for a bit.

http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html

What happened to my post?
Oh well, My vote is with the MS defrag.

The built in Windoze tool works fine, what's the real world reason to use anything else? It's not like most people host NSA databases at home and need uber performance. Just curious.

do it every 2 years

in windows you want split partitions, one for your OS (and apps), one for your data.
Only then can you manage fragmentation so it doesn't require constant maintenance.

defragging will only fight the symptom:that a single disk for everything, will fragment at alarming rates

Bingo.

I'd go further and put the OS on its own partition, with Apps on a 2nd & data on other virtual drives.

You can then wipe out WinDoze and re-install, with minimal destruction of your pgms & data.

That is whay I've done for decades.

Can I then set up the Windows OS on its own partition now or do I need to start over from scratch and do it when I reformat the drive only?

You'll pretty much need to reformat and reinstall to do that. You have to change partitions and format things and that sort of thing. Partition Magic and I'm sure there are other apps out there, will let you shrink and grow partitions and other fancy stuff, but the easiest way would be to start from scratch.

One thing to remember is to actually make both your OS and Apps partitions quite a bit bigger than you'd expect. Windows keeps copies of it's updates and the backout info which can be more than a gig after a while. Also, the temp files grows and can also be more than a gig.

Apps, you think, "this will be more than enough room," but things change, and if a couple of gigs seems like more than enough now, it'll be insufficient later. Better to make it plenty big.