[kaashifv]

I have had vista ultimate installed for about 2 months now, and recently my pc started to slow down, so i cleaned out my junk files and things like that. I used Disk Keeper 2007 Pro Premiere to defrag my hard drives, and on my C drive there seems to be many fragments which will not go away, even after multiple defrag attempts. (See screenshot).

Can anyone suggest how to get rid of these without formatting the drive?

Thanks.

[Elvandil]

Why would you even consider formatting the drive? Fragmented files make no difference at all to the operation of your system. Many files are locked and not defragged by Diskeeper, and those are mostly the system restore points. They can only be defragged offline, but they don't hurt anything and are fine fragmented.

I don't know if Diskeeper defrags those offline, but if not, it makes very little difference. You can never get all your files defragged--as soon as you turn off the defragger, more are fragmented and booting fragments many files.

[kaashifv]

hmmm...thats what i suspected...but it never hurts to get a second opinion! Thanks!

oh, and the formatting thing, that was just a side note...i was never going to format anyway ;p

[Elvandil]

I know it can be annoying, even though it doesn't really affect anything. I sometimes use an offline defragmenter from the UBCD4Win CD, Paragon Total Defrag, or even the defragmenter in the bootable CD's for Acronis Disk Director Server or Paragon Hard Drive Manager to defragment those files that other tools won't touch. But the gain is purely psychological and modern drives with NTFS will not perform any better.

You can get some gain by running Disk Cleanup before defragging and using the second page to remove all restore points except the last. Also, you could turn off System Restore for the defragging and then when you turn it back on, it will make a new restore point that is not fragmented. But all your previous restore points will be gone, which makes no difference if you make backups periodically with Acronis True Image or something. It may make no difference to you, anyway, if you don't need SR for a while.

Some of them don't defragment temp files or temporary internet files, either, so removing all those beforehand will give you a cleaner result, too. And, of course, using Diskeeper's offline, boot-time defrag (with or without PageDefrag, which also does a boot defrag) will get even more of them.