I RECENTLY UPDATED TO YOUR LATEST CCLEANER AND NOTICED THE ADDITION OF WIPE FREE SPACE. I USED IT BECAUSE I HAD NEVER DONE THAT BEFORE AND OKAY ITS GREAT. LISTEN, ONE THING I NOTICED IS NOW NOTHING SEEMS TO WANT TO WRITE TO THAT AREA WHICH IS PLENTIFUL, OVER 60GB OF FREE SPACE. EVERYTHING WANTS TO WRITE AND FRAGMENT IN THE ALREADY POPULATED AREA. I JUST DOWNLOADED DEFRAGGLER AS WELL AND IT IS SLIGHTLY REMINISCENT OF THE OLD SPINRITE, NICE TOOL THOUGH. GOT ANY CLUES?
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Please stop using all caps, it's difficult to read and is considered shouting on forums.

Wipe Free Space gives some people missing GB issues if you read around the forums. If you let it run it's course without stopping it or interfering with it the free disk space shouldn't have changed.

The Wipe Free Space missing GB issue that has plagued multiple CCleaner users is being looked into by the development team, as stated recently by MrRon in this post.

Thanks, sorry I wasn't shouting, just lazy
Not sure what u r saying. I am just wondering why with all the clean space does my computer desire too place everything in the populated area. Thanks, also defraggler sees 80 GB so it must be available? Right?

From a system development stand-point these sound like two completely different issues.

I understood the missing GB issue to be because wipe-free-space claims almost all available 100G space as one giant file, then writes random numbers across the file over and over to erase the data that was on the hard disc's surface. If CCleaner were to be forced to close before it "deleted" the file in the sense of telling the OS to delete the gigantic file, then you end up with a gigantic file which has not been "deleted" (in the OS sense, not related to the wiping sense, which is just ccleaner writing random data over the top of old data on a hard drive).

It's perfectly legal to have a gigantic file on your hard drive that has not been deleted. How to fix this from the user's point of view? Find the gigantic file and delete it.

How to "fix" this misperception / user-time-out from the developer's stand-point? Possibly create the file in the Temporary Files directory and don't set the Read-only bit (hence it will likely be deleted later if something goes wrong). Additionally instead of 1 gigantic 100g file, how about many smaller files and none of them over a certain size, say none larger than 5G.. that would create 20 5G files instead and wipe-free could then just make sure it deletes each of the first 19 as it completes them and updates the % completion.

Anyway, getting back to this person's question -- it sounds like what he's asking is "why does Windows make use of the free-space that's intermingled with the space that is already non-fragmented?" The answer in this case is, that's the way it's designed. That's the issue that creates the need for a defragmenter to begin with. If you think about it though, there's not much you can really do to get around this issue without either wasting a lot of hard drive space, or else a lot of time spent suddenly defragmenting your hard drive when you're trying to use the computer for something else. Imagine you boot up your computer and click on internet explorer so you can check your bank statement or whatever... and up pops the defragment utility and you have to wait to use IE until it's done defragmenting. This is a reason why Windows doesn't use the larger block of space that's further out, it would be impractical in the long run. It would also make for longer seeks, the head of the drive would have to move a longer distance to "switch between files". (there are other ways to get around the issue, but they involve OS changes, which Piriform is not doing and MS would be the one to talk to..)

MS claims to have designed Windows Vista and later to have over-come the need for defragmenting your system. I'm interested in how they accomplish this, I'm guessing they have a defragment process kick on when the system reaches an idle state for a few seconds and it defragments until interrupted.

Roger Tiedemann, Jr
A+, Network+, MCP

I don't think that the original post was about any missing free space, just that new files were being located in the already populated area of the disk. I guess, as Roger implies, for speed NTFS places the file as close to the current head position as possible, which is usually over other data. It would make sense for an area of free space to be found that is large enough to accept the new file size at the time of allocation, but I don't know enough of NTFS internals to say that this is true and don't really feel like looking it up at the moment.

NTFS itself is claimed to reduce the need for defragging. My spouse's XP Home SP1 laptop of some year's antiquity always said that the disk didn't need defragging when I ran the analysis stage, and it has all manner of rubbish on it. But I eventually defragged, after a number of years had passed.

PS Yes, Vista has an auto defragger, and I think it's on by default. It appears to schedule a low-priority defrag at every fourth pc boot. Seems a little like overkill, as I boot daily. Once a month should be plenty.

"All-caps" are shouting? Then, what is an exclamation point (!) for?

No, all-caps are simply all-caps.

No, all-caps are considered shouting on a forum whether you disagree or not, and did you register here just to contribute that observation?

Hardly seems worth it really.