Free space between files..

**Mombo323** · October 17th, 2006, 09:07 AM

I just reinstalled XP Home on a formatted drive. I also Installed updates. Disk defrag shows quite an area of free space on the graph between my files.. shouldn't it be all solid blue? (Compacted together). Why is there such a space I cannot close? Should I use Diskkeeper again because in the past, that prog has closed the space? the swap file in on the second slaved hard drive.

**BluesMan1** · October 18th, 2006, 06:00 AM

It's normal to have some space between the files. I have read a paper from somebody saying that he's first installing his OS than defrag the hd, he is following that installing updates than he defrag again and finally he's installing all his programs and defrag for the last time.

I know that it seems a lot of works but i'll do anything to keep my computer running an his max. I don't know if by doing a defrag after each step will make the space between the files disappear but the next time i'll reinstall my OS i'll try it and see for myself

**Jeordiewhite** · October 18th, 2006, 06:27 AM

Well it's diskeeper, one of the best ways to defrag all your files is to do an offline defrag or probably known by diskeeper: boot time defragmentation. Which I can't really remember how it's done with diskeeper since I don't personally use it anymore.

Basically during a reboot, during the first few stages of loading, diskeeper will start a defragment process on the drives you scheduled and this should defrag all files. The idea of this is to defragment while nothing is running so all files aren't locked and ready to be moved accordingly. Otherwise diskeeper might get interupted a bit by other running programs too much and use it's I/O sensing system and often time does just enough and stops so your system maybe free for other things if it sometimes stops unexpectly and doesn't quite finish. Also with diskeeper I believe you can defrag the MSFT and page file as well during this boot time scan as well.

I think diskeeper had a feature for best performance to monitor all your most used files/programs which I believe is called I-FAAST. So often times this type of defragment process it has takes a little time before it's fully optimised for your system. However it's good to do so for later defragmentations, which can slow down performance later on when it decides it needs to move things to the front for best I/O performance. It's not a huge slow down that should affect you, but when it restructures data, it just has more to do. Which typically when it has to move files, it has to start from the beginning and work with the data till it finishes to make it all contiguous and in order.
However depending on what version your using, you should check in options for that feature of doing the process during next reboot.