6/25/2023 0 Comments Free disk cleaner and defragmenter![]() ![]() So is it worth it to use or invest in commercial defragmentation software? I think it depends. If you are interested in learning more about fragmentation and its cause, then Wikipedia has an article about defragmentation. Some operating systems, most notably Linux and Mac OS X attempt to prevent fragmentation as much as possible and don’t even include defragmentation software, but the Windows software market is awash with both free and commercial defrag software. It is sort of like taking multivitamins – it most likely doesn’t hurt but there is no clear indicator that it cures diseases or makes you feel better after taking them. Now, after cleaning up all the space we’d want to defragment our drive as well, right? Disk defragmentation software has been around since MS-DOS, but people are still debating whether defragmentation software, especially commercial one, is worth the effort. The screenshot below shows msizap in action. Msizap is part of the Windows Installer 4.5 SDK which can be downloaded from. Using msizap has been the last resort for me a few times, freeing up significant space on the C drive of servers when nothing else could be moved or deleted. You can delete those so-called “orphaned cached Windows Installer data files” with the msizap.exe utility, using the G command-line switch. Depending on how long ago the OS was installed, this can be between a few hundred megabytes or nothing at all. Windows will sometimes cache and leave installer files on your C drive, even when the application is no longer installed or has been upgraded. Usual candidates are the temporary files, pagefile, IIS log files, NTBackup temp files and temporary installer MSI files (more on that below). But once you have identified files that do occupy significant amounts of disk space, you can engage in research to determine whether these files can be compressed, moved or deleted. Of course, just running Windirstat alone doesn’t mean that you will be able to find files that can be safely deleted. ![]() The screenshot below shows what Windirstat looks like on my Vista laptop with a 64Gb HD. I find it incredibly easy to spot files that can be safely deleted with Windirstat. to spot lots of unneeded temp files) or for large rectangles to identify any files you might not need anymore. The size of the rectangle is proportional to the file size, so you will either want to look for clusters of many small files (e.g. Windirstat uses a treemap which displays every file in a colored rectangle and was inspired by KDirStat from Linux (the original author really wants to make sure you know what the original is). There are a lot of tools out there that visualize disk space consumption on a volume, but my favorite by far is Windirstat. Once a machine is low on disk space one will usually want to find out which files use up the most space and move them to a new volume or send them to data heaven for good. We have found and utilized several tools over the past years and I am going to share some of my approaches to quickly identify space hogs, free up disk space and deal with fragmentation. The most common disk space problems I run into is a full C drive (why would you need more than 4Gb for the OS?) or a database that grows too large. Even though disk storage is cheaper and faster than ever, for some reason I still run into disk space problems on occasion.
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