I’ve had my work T42p laptop for over three years now but, even for an extra gig of RAM, I’m still reluctant to hand it over for a shiny new Lenovo T61p quite yet. However, it’s been heading towards unusable over the past few months with the hard disk thrashing continuously. Repeated attempts to defragment have met with limited success as the 100Gb drive is bursting at the seams and PageDefrag could only reduce the number of fragments for my 4Gb page file from 170+ to around 110!
As this week I was in the process of uninstalling WebSphere Integration Developer 6.0.2 prior to moving up to 6.1, I thought I would take advantage of the extra space and have another go at defragmenting the drive, this time with JkDefrag. As recommended, I set the page file size down to zero before starting. It took a staggering 24 hours to complete and must have moved practically every cluster on the disk. However, at the end Windows reported that I had only around 20 fragmented files (mostly logs for various system applications that would have been running at the time) and, barring JkDefrag’s own log file, each of those was in at most three fragments. What’s more, there was a nice big window in which to recreate my (fixed size) page file.
I’m glad to say that my Thinkpad now has a new lease of life and is flying along, even having crammed WebSphere Integration Developer 6.1 back on to the disk! I’ve setup JkDefrag as my screensaver now so hopefully I’ll avoid getting back in to the same state as before.