I have gone from Win 3.1 to Win95 to Win98 to WinXP .

In my Win95 days when one defragged, it was considered good practice to copy one's 386 swap file to ANOTHER hard drive (if one had one), defrag the C: drive, and then move the swapfile back. Is there any point at all in considering how to defrag a swap file in Win XP, since swapfiles are probably much LARGER than they used to be?

benhar

The only way to defrag the swap (aka page) file in XP is to do it before XP loads in what is called offline mode. Making a copy of it on another drive will do nothing, since the original will still be PRESENT and locked (and therefore impossible to defrag) in its original location.
The standard XP defragmentation TOOL can't do an offline defrag.
But Sysinternals/Microsoft have made a free tool available that can.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

Or try a 3rd party defraging tool like UltraDefrag.

EDIT:
Btw. another good (as in a lot better than XPs own defragger), free and often recommended 3rd party defragger is JKdefrag. It just doesn't have an off-line mode. But you can USE it and PageDefrag as a pair for online/offline defragging.Thanks very much, Deerpark, I'll have a look at the sites you posted. I knew there must be a way.

benhar





You're very welcome and happy defragging.