Windows: Defragment the swap file and registry
During normal defragmentation of the system hard drive, important areas such as the swap file and the registry remain unaffected. If you do not clean them manually, your system will slow down sooner or later.
This is how you defragment the swap file and registry
Windows and common defragmenters cannot access the files that the system has already opened exclusively and thus blocked. For this reason, for example, the registry data and the paging file are usually left out during optimization. However, since these files are used frequently and take up a lot of storage space, their fragmentation slows down the system particularly strongly. But there is a specialist for Windows XP: The "Pagedefrag" tool uses the start-up phase of the PC to defragment these files. At this point, Windows is not yet accessing it.
- Download the program and unzip the ZIP archive. Call the resulting "pagedefrag.exe" file to start the program.
- It first shows how many clusters occupy the respective system files and how far they are "dismembered". In addition to the swap file and the branches of the registry, the tool also processes event logs and the hibernation file. Their size corresponds to the amount of main memory installed.
- To run once, select the "Defragment at next boot" option and click "OK". Restart the computer. During the boot process, the tool does its job and creates a status report. You can check the success by calling the program again under Windows and checking the current status in the dialog. You should repeat this type of defragmentation from time to time. As a result, you will enjoy significantly shorter boot and shutdown times.
- You can also automate this process. To do this, select the "Defragment every boot" option in the dialog, change the value for "Defrag abort countdown" to "0" and confirm with "OK". In future, "pagedefrag" will check the status every time the system is started and optimize the files if necessary. The test itself takes barely a second.
- If you do not want control every time you boot, you can alternatively automate the execution with the Task Scheduler. To do this, use the call "pagedefrag -o -t 0". It causes the one-time defragmentation the next time it boots.
The size of the paging file is also decisive - we will tell you what you should pay attention to in this article.