Thursday, May 19, 2005

Defrag

It often happens that I run across a little corner of Windows that I never knew was there. So with Steve Rogers' recent post: why wasn't I informed previously that there's a command-line disk defrag tool built-in?

12 comments:

  1. I discovered that not so long ago too. Now I have a script that runs it every night. Since it made life that much better, I also use contig from sysinternals [1] on my pre-WinXP machines..



    [1] http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/contig.shtml

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  2. I learned ábout this in WinXP a little over one year ago. Of course I went straight to create a scheduled task.

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  3. John: What are these pre-WinXP machines of which you speak? :)



    Sergio: Dude, why didn't you tell me about it a year ago? ;)

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  4. Hey, one of my machines still runs Win95! :)



    Most of my windows boxes are Win2k.



    But I have 17 computers, and most of them run *nix. I got an old Sun Enterprise 3000 last week. Trying to get that to run is my new favorite thing to do.



    Here, let me see:



    1xWin2k3

    2xWinXP

    4xWin2k

    1xWin95

    2xSmoothwall

    1xFreeBSD

    2xDebian Woody

    1xMEPIS

    1xDebian Sarge

    1xSolaris

    1xOS10



    But I think I need to get a few more.. :D

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  5. Thanks for these tips.



    Actually I been looking for a good commandline defrag tool, and now I found it :)

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  6. John: I've never even heard of MEPIS. You must not have any kids. :)



    Klok: glad to help!

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  7. Yeah.. you got me. No kids. I haven't ever found a place where you could download them.. :)



    MEPIS is pretty cool. It's a Debian-esque Linux distribution, known for its ease of installation and impressive hardware support. One of the cool things about MEPIS is that you can boot the entire operating system (into a full GUI environment with heaps of applications available) straight from the CD.



    http://www.mepis.org/

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  8. No need to download: writing your own is the easy part. :)



    MEPIS: sounds cool. The one I'm going to try next that has that feature is Ubuntu.

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  9. ...this is one of those 'pair programming' things, isn't it? :)



    Ubuntu is on my TODO list too.

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  10. Speaking of "did you know", you can make Windows XP boot from a CD as well. Get the tools for Windows XP Embedded, select whatever components you need (XP Embedded runs the same binaries as XP Pro but it's modularized, you can only include chkdsk and its dependencies if you wish) and specify that it will boot from read-only media with an in-memory hard drive for necessary writes.



    As soon as I get some spare time on my hands, I want to build a CD that boots Windows XP and runs chkdsk on all FAT/FAT32/NTFS drives it identifies. I think it would be a killer for dead systems. (Yeah, I know that's what the recovery options on the Windows XP CD are for, but I need to start from somewhere :))

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  11. Pair development definitely encouraged, although not required past writing the kernel. ;)



    An XP boot CD? Pretty cool.

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  12. What I like about the command line version is it runs so much faster that the graphical defrag

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