Free defrag?
 

My 2 year old sony Vaio machine is starting to slow down.

Anyone know a good free software for defragging the HD and the registry?

Windows has defrag on it for free. Right click on the "Start" button and hit "explore"...

Go to whichever drive you want to defrag and right click on it. On the bottom there is the "properties" and click on that. Go to "Tools" then to "Defrag" then click on the drive and away you go! You do need 15% free space on the drive to do it though...

If you think it is slow, take off your important files, reformat, and reload windows. Just did that with an old laptop, couldn't believe the difference.

Good idea. I do that about every 9-12 months. The computer loads up with all sorts of crap and its just better to wipe it and start new.

That said, if you want to really speed it up and do it right, try this. Find out what size drive you have, probably 20-30 gig and go online and buy a 60-80 gig drive for your laptop. Make sure its a 7200 rpm drive. You will pay extra for the faster speed drive but its worth it. Take all of the data off of your old drive and onto a memory stick or DVD/CD.

Get it home and swap the drives. Put your "rescue disk" in the laptop and have it put all the usual programs and OS on the drive. Then load your new programs and saved files from the memory stick, DVD/CD and see what happens.

I did this with a 2 year old Dell I had and the speed increase was surprising. The old drives are 5400 rpm and jumping to the faster drive made it boot in half the time. Cost is under $100 and a few hours work.

Windows included defrag doesn't reorder the data, just makes the files closer together, so you still end up with empty holes all over the disk. I'm looking for a thorough defrag that will open up all the free space. Thanks,

MS licensed diskkeeper (IIRC) for Win2k+, they may have a stand alone product still. Also, one of the disk resizers like partition magic may do it as well...

1+ on diskeeper they do have a 30 day fully functional trial download available (it does pop up to buy every so often)
the professional version works well and if you configure it to run as a service it can defrag your paging file on boot.

For the registry I've just used regclean, (free download) you need to run it several times but it cleans up reg errors and erroneous entries, also creates a backup of your registry just in case.

Agree with a clean install (if possible) especially if the o/s is a OEM pre install, they load to much crap on there.

Rob

Not to turn this into (another) windows-bashing thread but have you considered an alternative OS? Preferably one that doesn't require a reboot every time you load a new driver and has to be reloaded every 6 months due to all the bloated crap it accrues over time?

Might be worth a look.

shhhhhhh, you might get it mad..... ;)

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