ok so i scanned my pc today and it says 49% fragmentation and 18.4 gb of fragmented files, i tried to deag without any luck, i have a pretty small harddrive(37.3gb) and it says "you have less then 10% of real free space so dfrag will be limited and possibley slow, defrag anyway? what should i do?
You can do any or all: (1) delete unnecessary files, (2) transfer personal files to optical disks and flash drives, (3) leave the disk fragmented. If you follow option 2 you can return those files to the hard drive after a successful defrag.
Most defraggers would consider 10% free space too little - 15% a bare minimum. When it comes to defragging, the more free space you have the smoother the defrag.
There are lots of places where Windows tends to store files you may not need and fill up you hard drive.
- Clear Internet Explorer's "Temporary Internet Files"
- Turn Off System Restore, Turn On System Restore (do this only of your machine is running okay and no need to roll back)
- open "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temp" and bin all the files (one or two files maybe locked which is normal)
alternatively you could run CCleaner
Richard S.
Download CCleaner, run it, then head on over to Tools > System Restore.
Get rid of your older restore points, or turn system restore off completely via control panel > system. They tend to eat up a lot of space and create large fragments.
But having fragmented System Restore Points is usually better than having no System Restore Points.
Unless your disk is nearly full, you should leave System Restore on.
Simply exclude all C:\System Volume Information\ files in Defraggler (you'll need to enable view of system files/folders in Windows Explorer to view this folder)