In the pursuit for performance, making sure your drive isn’t fragmented is a regular task. The problem is that Windows XP doesn’t allow certain system files to be defragmented without commercial software. What about free solutions?
There’s a utility called PageDefrag from Sysinternals (Microsoft) that lets you do one single task, and it does it well. It runs as a boot-time process that defragments the system files before they are locked by XP.
Thanks to Reader Shawn for suggesting this as a topic.
Defragment Your System Files
When you open up the application, you’ll see a list of the system files and the number of fragments each file is in. Select the “Defragment at next boot” option, or you could even choose to defragment at every boot, although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that.
When you reboot, you’ll be prompted by PageDefrag to hit a key if you don’t want to defragment now.
If you didn’t abort the defrag, you’ll now see the defragment in process. As you can see, mine didn’t need to be defragmented anyway…
If you selected the option to defragment on every boot but would like to remove it, you can open up the application and select “Don’t defragment (uninstall)”, and then click the OK button.
This should be an essential utility in any geek’s toolkit. Note that this isn’t a substitute for defragmenting your other files on a regular basis.
Download PageDefrag from Majorgeeks.com
The SuperFetch service in Windows Vista preloads your system’s memory with the applications that you use most often. This makes launching of those applications much faster, but it might be an unwanted behavior for system tweakers or gamers.
I am not a fan of the delay that can occur between clicking the start menu and waiting for it to display. Here is a quick Registry tweak that will allow for the start menu to display more quickly
If you have an issue with your system clock losing time, you’ve probably had to go and re-sync your clock with the internet time servers. The problem is that there are just way too many clicks required to get to the right screen, so the command line is much simpler.
When it comes to Internet Freedom I believe the candidate with the best position is Ron Paul. You can check it out in his own words.
If you are a fan of the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox you might wonder how to change the script editor/viewer as there is no option for this in the UI. It’s even worse when you download scripts from some website and the line endings don’t work in the inferior default editor.
For anyone even semi-familiar with the Internet I am sure you are aware of the Ron Paul Revolution. His name currently is the #1 googled subject right now. The Ron Paul presidential campaign has basically taken over YouTube and his support has gained reputable positions on popular social
As a programmer and a fairly terrible web designer, I often need to select a color from an image somewhere on the screen, and it gets really tiring to take a screenshot, paste into Photoshop and use the eyedropper there.
Have you ever noticed that sometimes Firefox isn’t very responsive while loading a page? As a frequent StumbleUpon user, this behavior grates on my nerves so I went looking for a solution.
If there’s one thing that annoys me in Internet Explorer more than anything else, it’s that there is no way to re-open a tab once you’ve closed it. It’s especially annoying when you’ve done a lot of browsing so you have to sift through your history to find the link for the page you closed.
If you’ve switched from Yahoo! over to Gmail because you prefer to read your email in a desktop client such as Thunderbird, you probably are wondering how you can do the same thing with Yahoo! for free.