Nisadas

Lifehacker did an article on Windows performance myths sometime last year which mentioned that RAM optimizers/defraggers were the equivalent of snake oil.

However, the benefits of defragmenting the hard disk haven’t been debunked yet (or at least not as per my cursory googling), so my obsessive weekly/monthly defrag runs haven’t been in vain.

One tool that would be of use in keeping a well defragmented hard disk would be a simple command-line utility called Contig. This doesn’t help very much in putting files towards the beginning of the partition like other defraggers, but when you have a few files that are regularly fragmented (thus causing delays in file access) Contig can help ease the trouble by addressing only the specific files affected.

I generally run Contig after first using the built-in Windows Defragmenter tool to see what files have the highest fragmentation. I then run Contig on these files (generally my Personal Mail folders – .pst files) to ensure that they form contiguous files and therefore should increase system performance.

Do you defragment your hard disk? What do you use for that purpose?