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immovable


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Hi holyskeleton

Usually you should not set the page file to less than the recommended size for best performance.

What do you want to achieve?

The immovables can also be fx. hibernation files or system restore files

These files can become fragmented too and fx. Pagedefrag or BootVis can help defragment these files.

I have attached a picture of my recent Deep Defrag on my laptop

Cheers

solbjerg

 

 

are the immovable files just system page files? I've set the page files to 0MB but it's still showing up in SmartDefrag.

 

http://i40.tinypic.com/2ch2mqh.png

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Hi holyskeleton

Also metadata files (data about data)

You are a gamer perhaps?

Cheers

solbjerg

 

as far as i know hibernate is disabled so they must be system restore files.

 

I have 4 GB RAM on the laptop so I figured there's no need to use hard drive for memory since they're only 5400 rpm.

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Hi holyskeleton, the first post and most of the posts in Think about Defragmentation!!! thread is still valid.:-P Please, also have a look at the images in post #1 there to see all the system files.

 

The most important files to be contiguous are MFT and MFT Zone to have a positive effect on the speed.

 

It is clearly seen in your screenshot that they are fragmented.

 

Since you have considerable size in your drives, it is advisable to have a Page file at least in drive D:\ whatever the RPMs of the drives are, otherwise in your Vista, it will be created in time in drive C in some time and will be fragmented if you don't define it.

 

Cheers.

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http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr44/Maxxwire_Photos/Album%202/-SC-1.jpg

 

holyskeleton- This is what happens when I use Disc Cleanup to remove the 20+GB of Shadow Copies that Vista puts on the C drive every week or so.

 

~Maxx~

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Hi Maxx

Nice pictures

Do you have that service running automatically, isn't it sufficient to run it manually?

Cheers

solbjerg

 

http://i468.photobucket.com/albums/rr44/Maxxwire_Photos/Album%202/-SC-1.jpg

 

holyskeleton- This is what happens when I use Disc Cleanup to remove the 20+GB of Shadow Copies that Vista puts on the C drive every week or so.

 

~Maxx~

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solbjerg- Although I have 76 of the 137 services in the Vista OS stopped completely there is no option to alter the functioning of the Volume Shadow Copy Service like there is in the XP OS, but in 3 clicks

all the Shadow Copies can be completely eliminated in Vista using the convenient Disc Cleanup Tool.

 

~Maxx~

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Hi Maxxwire,

 

Can it be that, it could have been misunderstood from your 1st post that the Disk Cleanup Tool is scheduled to run every week?

 

My preference of geting rid of them is turning System Restore Off (you can do that in Vista too) and then On, and create a System Restore point.

That way the dependency to older shadows issue is eliminated, and the created restore file is smaller.

 

Certainly my preference wouldn't work if there is a group policy for SR, then your solution is the only one left to use.

 

Cheers.

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enoskype- I am reluctant to schedule a regular disk cleanup in that it might turn out that I need the information in the Shadow Copies to retrieve lost files so I prefer to do it manually which takes less than 1 minute of my time.

 

~Maxx~

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I understand what page files are for, and that other system files can be marked as 'immovable'. However can someone tell me what I'm supposed to do when almost everything is marked that way?

 

When I first installed Smart Defrag, only the system files were marked this way, but for the last two weeks everything has been marked as immovable - even when trying to run in safe mode or run as administrator.

 

Any ideas?

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Hi zombie

What happened 2 weeks ago? Install-wise - setting-wise?

Do you use ASC too? Did you run System Optimization without putting any "problems" in the ignore list?

Or have you recently (inside 2 weeks) updated SmartDefrag without shutting down the automatic functions?

Could you please describe the actions that lead up to this?

Cheers

solbjerg

 

 

I understand what page files are for, and that other system files can be marked as 'immovable'. However can someone tell me what I'm supposed to do when almost everything is marked that way?

 

When I first installed Smart Defrag, only the system files were marked this way, but for the last two weeks everything has been marked as immovable - even when trying to run in safe mode or run as administrator.

 

Any ideas?

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The version of Smart Defrag in the screen capture is the only one I had installed 5 weeks ago. I installed ASC about a week before installing Smart Defrag, with an immediate reboot after an error-free install on Vista Enterprise SP1. I ran it once just after it was installed, and turned off the setting which removes ununsed file extensions before it was run. (I have an Adobe CS3 license, and ASC was trying to remove some of the many file extension associations that I hadn't yet used.) Everything else with ASC was defaults. Aside from 'clutter' (mainly temp files), there were about 80 registry error that it corrected. I followed that cleanup with a reboot, and some minor speed improvement was noticed.

 

I've checked the system logs, and no record of installs or uninstalls since Smart Defrag was added. I rebooted once after Smart Defrag was installed, then was able to run it for about a week with near perfect results. Everything but the registry active hives were showing as moveable. System speed improved dramatically, and I set up the auto-defrag and scheduled defrag. I also started the machine (System Properties screen capture attached) in safe mode once to run the defrag, as I had read (not on this forum) that any defrag program will work better in that mode because fewer files are locked by the kernel. Again, all went very well for some time.

 

About 2 weeks ago, I started seeing the defrag finish within seconds instead of hours. At first I thought that the drive was already defragmented and this was just confirmation. However when I did the weekly 'safe mode' defrag and actually watched it, I realised what was happening.

 

If you need more information, please let me know.

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zombie-That's strange indeed.Have you tried your systems defragger to see if it indicates that all of these files are immovable? I'll give you about a day to get back if you haven't.By the way,I'm in total agreement with defrag in safe mode-I do it all the time.I had an instance of SD showing a fairly large group of files as immovable(nothing like yours) when I updated from v 1.03 to v 1.11,and I used another utility for one pass,and it seemed to put things back in order,and has remained so as I continue to use SD.You might want to give this defragger a try(works very well for me)and see what happens.

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I've tried the system defrag (which unfortunately under Vista doesn't actually show you graphically how fragmented the drive has become), and it runs for around 2 hours - indicating that it has a reasonable amount of work that it thinks has to be done.

 

I've also tried the command line 'config' tool from SysInternals. This usually just makes files contiguous without arranging them on the platter for faster access. However it can produce a brief report on fragmentation, and shows 23% when Smart Defrag reports 0%.

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I've just installed Smart Defrag on an XPproSP3 virtual machine. The system defrag tool shows 31% after installing the OS and Office yesterday, and Smart Defrag shows only 11%. Clearly one of them is giving a false report.

 

As for this machine, I'll image the drive onto another physical disc (same make / model / capacity) and see if I can get a different result reported. It will also give me a chance to try UltimateDefrag to see what it has to say. I should be able to post back later today.

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As for Smart Defrag, I suspect that it is the one which is under-reporting the fragmentation. Even once it had reduced the fragmentation to 0% (23m), the system defrag tool was still reporting 19% - and even showing where it was. Once the system tool had reduced it to it's version of 0% (another 1h11m), there was a noticeable speed improvement.

 

After reverting to an earlier snapshot (31% fragmentation), the UltimateDefrag worked spectacularly well, and I'm considering actually paying for it if it continues to perform that well (speed = 18m, final results = 0%).

 

I'll have to try all this out with the disc image (now done) of my Vista machine with the original problem.

 

Perhaps the 'immovable' files are related to the system defrag tool??? After the system defrag tool had run a couple of times, Smart Defrag started reporting about 60% of the files as 'immovable', then almost 100%.

 

I'll have to test this theory, but until I have - does anyone else have an idea of what might be causing this issue?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Considering that Vista uses a lot of memory, I think it is a bad idea not to create a permanent paging file, that should live in the middle of the boot partition (if you have only one physical drive), or on the first partiton of an alternate physical drive. If you don't create it, Widnows will create one for yuo but it will be extrmely fragmented. Set it to a size that is at least the recommended size displayed, but in only one time.

Don't use the Windwos interface to change the paging file size, unless you first remove it, and reboot, then recreate it with the desired size only after defragmenting the drive.

 

I've also seen absoutely no benefit for putting the paging file on multiple disks. Windows is more efficient with a single paging file.

 

Disabling completely the shadow copies is not a very good idea these days. It's proven that those copies can really help in case of crashes, to avoid losing data (because Windows can recover from a crash using those copies).

However, it's a good idea to reduce the size of those shadow copies (because the maximum size of these shadows is certanily too big). This is possible in the advanced system properties.

 

However, there are other disk space that no existing tool can defragment: this is the USN journal, hose growth is completely unpredictable. The only way to defragment it can only pass through a offline backup (you can boot from a CDROM image, then run the full system backup from there; you'll have to reformat the NTFS volume completely before restoring the data from the backup.)

 

I've looked everywhere on the Net, and there's apparently no documented way to defragment this USN journal (I had a system where it was extremely heavily fragmented).

 

What is documented is a command line tool (fsutil.exe) in the Windows system directory that you can use to delete the USN journal, but it is immediately recreated: after testing it, I immediately realized that it was recreated and growing exactly at the same place as before, so the effect was only temporary and did not last more than 2 days. In fact the USN journal gets filled automatically by every file move made by the Windows defragmentation API.

 

I cannot understand why the Windows NTFS driver does not allocate the spaace for the USN journal in just one operation and in a single fragment, all what it can do is to recerate it with a ridiculous initial size and then increase it incrementally with a strange formula that creates a lot of free gaps on disk. Given that it should be a cyclic file, it would be better if it was created in the third of the free space that Windows uses for allocated new files, and handled as a sparse file so that oldest (and smallest) initial fragments can be released, and later replaced cyclicly by larger newer fragments if more space is needed in the USN journal between two daily system snapshots. The maximum size shuold be tracked, and with the help of daily system snapshots and monitoring, the USN journal would reach its optimum size (and the older smaller fragments cuold be eliminated). Unfortunately, this USN journal is a space hog on NTFS within Vista (it was working much better in XP and Server 2003).

 

I can't understand why Vista needs to write so many information in this journal (In fact I can see a reason: there are too many event log files in Vista, and Vista writes too many things in them, most of the events are monitored by absolutely nobody; in XP and Server 2003, there only 4 event files and it was enough and much faster, and did not require a lot of NTFS filespace management operations, so there was much less activity recorded in the USN journal).

 

There's a way to improve the situation anyway: open the Vista Events Viewer: you can disable almost all the event logs in the "Applications and services logs\Microsoft\Windows" category (except those in the main "Windows logs" category): Just keep the standard "System" and "Security" event logs, that you can also cleanup their messages from time to time to recover their space after looking in it for past errors, or before rebooting to diagnose problems more easily. If you are not in a networked domain environment, you may also disable the Security event log. Keep the System event log as they are really needed.

 

You can also recover system files fragmented space (i.e. all the hidden files stored in "C:\System Volume Information" that include system snapshots) by using the System control panel, creating two snapshots successively and then using Cleanmgr to drop all the oldest snapshots: the files currently open from the system snapshot cant be defragmented as they are active. This is visibly independant of the system shadow copies that are also written and tracked in the active system snapshot files.

 

Note that I've not seen any system cleanup tool (including the most powerful ones, like RegCure which I think is still better than ioBit's ASC) performing the cleanup of the system event logs: this is extremely long to do manually in the Event Viewer, due to the number of categories and its almost unusable user interface where you constantly need to click everywhere in a confusive GUI layout for the various dialogs...

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Hi verdy_p,

 

I agree most of the parts, but not to the conclusion that "no existing tool can defragment USN Journal".

 

I have replied to you in an other thread a while ago about that. Please have a look to this post there, or this post in this thread.

 

PerfectDisk defragments USN Journal, it is clearly seen in the attached images there.

 

I am going to copy your post to Think about Defragmentation!!! thread, as it is very informative.

 

Thank you.

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Still trying to get Smart Defrag working...

 

I agree - that's a great post Verde, but do you have any wisdom to share on why Smart Defrag sees all my files as 'immovable'? :???:

 

I've tried un-installing and re-installing Smart Defrag - same result. I've even added an entry for it using the Microsoft Application Compatibility Toolkit to ensure that it always runs with the highest possible rights - same result. At the moment it is a completely useless piece of software for me.

 

I would still like to solve this issue, but if no-one has any relevant answers, then I'll probably end up paying for UltimateDefrag when the trial period ends in a few days.

 

Smart Defrag started out well, but if it can't continue to do it's job, then it is destined for the recycle bin! :cry:

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