m. every Wednesday morning from
now until the end of time.
PC not on in the middle of the night? Defragmenter will run the next morning
while you??™re working (when the PC is idle, anyway). Or, if you want to
run it by hand, open Windows Explorer, right-click your hard disk, select
Properties, choose the Tools tab, and click Defragment Now (Figure 5-9).
Disk Defragmenter does its job by rearranging the files on your hard disk to
make them contiguous (not broken into pieces). It also defragments the free
space by consolidating your files as much as it can. When run automatically, it
has no interface to speak of, but rather runs invisibly in the background.
Now for the bad news.
In each successive version of Windows, Microsoft has further buried Disk
Defragmenter; in Vista, it??™s basically invisible. For most Vista users, this is a
good thing, but its severely minimalist design prevents just about any
advanced tasks.
For instance, there??™s no way to defragment the swap file (virtual memory),
the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys), or any other unmovable files. There??™s no
disk map, so you won??™t know if there??™s a large file that won??™t defragment. If
you have more than one hard disk (or partition), there??™s no way to defragment
all your drives in one pass unless you schedule it.
Figure 5-8. File fragmentation on your hard disk can hurt performance and decrease
reliability
244 | Chapter 5: Performance
Now, to be fair, these are some pretty niche features.
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