Regular defragmentation keeps the
system performance consistent. But
you cannot sit at your PC through this
entire process. What is also irritating
is that defragmentation needs to be
manually activated if there are several
hard disks.
The graphical interface of
Windows’ defragmenter does not provide
the option to process several drives one
after the other, at least under XP. What a
lot of people don’t know is that Windows
has an additional command line tool
called ‘defrag.exe’ that is suitable for
batch processing as well. You can use
it to automate the defragmentation of
several drives. If you operate a system
with the drives C, D and E for instance,
enter the following in Notepad:
@echo off
defrag.exe -f c
defrag.exe -f d
defrag.exe -f e
Save the fi le as ‘defrag.cmd’. If you
are using other drive names or more
drives, change the fi le accordingly.
Double click this fi le to defragment
all hard disk partitions one after the
other automatically without a break.
However you need to be logged in with
administrator rights for running the fi le.
The used parameter ‘-f’ carries out the
defragmentation even if the hard disk has
less than 10 percent free space, without
pausing for an error message. But the
process takes too long in that case. What
you can do is delete the large fi les that
are no longer required.
Vista and Windows 7 regulate
defragmentation automatically on the
basis of a schedule. Irrespective of that,
you can either use the batch processing
operation via ‘defrag.exe’ or even select
several drives simultaneously with the
graphical interface.
For this, right click a drive entry (e.g.
in Explorer) for both the versions, select
the context command ‘Properties’,
activate the tab ‘Tools’ and then click
the ‘Defragment now’ button. Under
Vista, click the ‘Select Volumes’ button
and you can then activate several drives
for defragmentation or select ‘Select all
data carriers’. Under Win7, keep the [Ctrl]
key pressed and then select the desired
drives by clicking the entries one after
the other.
