Hello amigos,

I have a small question if anyone could spare me an answer, I would greatly appreciate it.

I have found when doing my scheduled defrag of my pc that many of the movies I download off the net are so fragmented that defrag usually shuts down after spending time trying to defrag these files.

Is there a application or maybe just a procedure I should use to defrag these .wmv and .mpg files rather than using XP media OS, ver. 2005 tools?

I imagine they will play better if the player is not having to piece together 4000 fragments to enable you to watch a 900 meg movie, or does it matter that much?

Thanks
Winter Lion

how much free space do you have on the C:/ partition ? ... if it is less than 2 GB, that's probably why it is crashing

all defrag programs on the net will cost money unfortunately

Winter Lion,

You should try 'Diskeeper'. It's an outstanding defrag program. It's not free, but well worth the price and they have excellent support. You can try it for free, just head over to their web site. I beleive it's just www.diskeeper.com
You can also go over to www.pcworld.com and do a search for defreg programs, you might come up with a free one there to try also. But I highly recommend Diskeeper Home edition.
Good luck and hope this helps.

I have 320gigs with over 250 free at present. I am not so much concerned with crashing, but defrag just says its done and offers up a log file showing way too much fragmentation for this nerd. I am used to defragging to the point where I have less than 1 percent fragmentation and with XP I usually get a very good defrag job. But these movies are the exception, maybe I can learn to ignore this glitch,.....................yeah, right!!!

Thanks anyways Tex..........................If this is my only problem today, life is good, eh?

Thanks Joanied, I will buy a copy of disckeeper. Good software is worth the entrance fee. Trial versions are just too much of a short term hassle for the most part, I agree. Thx again.

Winter

Yes large audio/video files become fragmented easier esp. if do any moving/copying within Explorer or multimedia editing. There is no extra procedure for media files, but there a few pointers:

Have a separate partition/drive for media files. DiskKeeper or PerfectDisk are the best.. giving you more control and allow offline defragmentation/smart placement. WINXp built-in defragger is not that great.

Doubt the app shuts down bescause they are so fragmented. Like TexMex says, you will need 20% min space to defrag properly and need to disable any bg tasks. i.e. antivirus, screensavers etc.

250 free gigs on the windows partition ? not a good idea either ... window$ does not and has never liked large paritions (over 20-30 gigs) for the main (where the windows folder is located) partition. Either way, with that much space, splitting it into say a 20 gig Window$ partition and 3 x 100 gig partitions or 2 x 150 gig partitions is not a bad idea and will most definately help fragmentation problems among others

The thing is, I have two identical HD Sata serial drives from WD. I have them set up so that every other byte of stored files is on the opposite drive. A kinda of double barrel data feeder for my info hungry CPU, Vid card and Dvd burner. I don't even want to think about splitting each of them into system and data partitions and then getting the
Ata controller to set it up without biatching too much.

But good news, The referral to the DiscKeeper site was golden. Check out this defrag report after 25 mins of defrag by DK. Wow, Joanied, you are a luv to share this with me and I owe you a big one!

Thanks to everyone else as well for answering my post. You may now all bow down and smooch Joanied's well versed and happily sharing intelect. She pwned us all today.


Fragmentation percentage
Volume fragmentation = 0 %
Data fragmentation = 0 %

File fragmentation
Total files = 107,785<--------------------Seems a little conservative
Average file size = 1,167 KB
Total fragmented files = 70
Total excess fragments = 190
Average fragments per file = 1.00<-------------------Groovy!

Files with performance loss = 70
Paging file fragmentation
Paging/Swap file size = 500 MB
Total fragments = 1

Directory fragmentation
Total directories = 8,176
Fragmented directories = 1
Excess directory fragments = 2

Master File Table (MFT) fragmentation
Total MFT size = 132 MB
MFT records In Use = 119,927
Percent MFT in use = 88 %
Total MFT fragments = 2

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fragments File size Most fragmented files
22 1,739 KB \Documents and Settings\All Users\Documents\Monolith


Joanied's summer home caretaker..............................Winter

Glad you got it to work. Been using the PRO version for a year.
Next time if you are just looking for a particular piece of software, please post in REQUESTS section.

Cheers

Roger that, Mischcabob.

But I really didn't know what I was looking for at the start of this thread. It just turned out well, that all I needed was a better defrag program, that's all.

But I will keep your admonishment in mind when looking for software recommendations in the future for sure, mate. Thanks for the heads up.

Winter