Defrag, Fast & Free

WINDOWS TIP SHEET: Defrag, Fast & Free

By Jeffery Hicks

I'm a big believer that a properly defragged disk is faster and healthier. It is convenient that Microsoft includes a free defragmentation tool, although it has limitations. Of course there are full fledged defrag applications if your budget allows. But I'm always looking for a good free or open source alternative.

Lately I've been trying JKDefrag v3.62 from Jeroen Kessels http://www.kessels.com/JkDefrag/index.html. This open source product comes packaged for Windows 2000/XP/2003 and Vista, as well as a 64-bit version. The utility is written using the same Windows defragmentation APIs that the big vendors use and it has been pretty rock-solid so far.

Installation is practically non-existent: Unzip the files to a folder and you're done. The graphical version is as bare bones as you can get -- no menu, no buttons. Just click it and it runs. Because it's barebones, it's a small executable that runs very quickly.

You can manually launch the graphical version from the command line and pass configuration parameters. But if you prefer more granular control and don't really care about a GUI, then I recommend just running the command line version.

The command line version has a wealth of parameters and because it's CLI based, it's incredibly easy to set up as a scheduled task. You could easily push out the exe file to all your clients and remotely create a scheduled task to run a daily defrag job. There is also a screen saver version of the utility.

Documentation is included as an HTML file and is pretty complete.
JKDefrag also has a decent online support forum.

So if you're looking for a defrag solution that is a step above what comes with Windows but have a limited budget, take a look at JKDefrag.
It's free so you've got nothing to lose!

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Jeffery Hicks MCSE, MCSA, MCT is a senior network engineer with Visory Group.