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Who's defragging my drive?


Augeas

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I like the name of the program because Windows Search in XP finds little sometimes when looking for a particular file it deems you shouldn't find in some "protected folder location." I use NirSoft SearchMyFiles.

Windows Search in XP locks up solid and gives zero results on an external drive with Acronis image file backups.

I configured it to refrain from exploring zip archives etc but it still insisted and abusing Acronis executables to enter the backup and seize up solid.

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Windows Search in XP locks up solid and gives zero results on an external drive with Acronis image file backups.

I configured it to refrain from exploring zip archives etc but it still insisted and abusing Acronis executables to enter the backup and seize up solid.

 

Just an FYI: I just tried Everything and Nirsofts app and they both found all my Acronis backups (with the .tib extension), on this and an external HD. wxp home here.

The CCleaner SLIM version is always released a bit after any new version; when it is it will be HERE :-)

Pssssst: ... It isn't really a cloud. Its a bunch of big, giant servers.

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Windows Search in XP locks up solid and gives zero results on an external drive with Acronis image file backups.

I find the XP search completely useless even on non-external drives in it's absolute refusal to find so many things, that and it's really slow too. Thankfully there's alternative replacements for it!

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If it's on a Windows XP system using Microsoft's Tweak UI can turn off that "auto-defrag", just disable it in the General section "Optimize hard disk when idle" tick box...

Tunerz / Winamp2.ini / Andavari:

 

I was thinking about your posts regarding background boot optimization defrags and think I may have to revise comments I made in messages #11 and #14. I just want to confirm first that these boot optimization defrags you're talking about are the idle-time defrags that run after every boot-up and defrag important Windows boot files to minimize start-up times, cannot be disabled from Task Scheduler (at least in XP and Vista - I'm not sure about Win 7) and can only be disabled with a registry edit (see the MSDN article here and the Vista tutorial here). As far as I know there are three registry keys related to the optimization of boot files:

 

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\OptimalLayout

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Prefetcher

 

I recently came across an article by TweakHound here titled "Bad Tweaks" describing how these registry keys can be disabled in XP, and a sidebar in that article states that these boot optimization defrags start 10 minutes after the system goes into idle. I'm beginning to wonder now if the Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD) defrags I'm seeing that seem to pop up randomly during system idles are actually just an interrupted background boot optimization defrag trying to run to completion. If that's the case then I don't know why these boot optimization defrags would run during idle for up to an hour at a time (at least on my system) or why they would indiscriminantly defrag everything except for large shadow copies (i.e., system restore points which are excluded from full WDD defrags anyway), but maybe these "silent" idle-time WDD defrags I frequently see are just a boot optimization defrag gone wild.

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Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 * CCleaner 3.08.1475 * Defraggler 2.06.328

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

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I also wanted to mention that my Norton Internet Security (NIS) Insight Optimizer is disabled (Settings | Miscellaneous Settings | Idle Time Optimizer | Off - see attached .jpg), so it's unlikely that NIS is the source of any of my idle-time defrags.

 

post-28709-0-74789700-1312032242_thumb.jpg

 

I'm not certain if NIS still uses the old Norton Speed Disk technology or if it calls the native Windows Disk Defragmenter (WDD), but if you have security software on your computer it could also be running idle-time defrags in addition to the background WDD boot optimization defrags I described in message #29.

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Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 * CCleaner 3.08.1475 * Defraggler 2.06.328

HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS

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I was thinking about your posts regarding background boot optimization defrags and think I may have to revise comments I made in messages #11 and #14.

What I was referring to is this, taken straight from the Dial-a-fix description of it's tool 'Process Idle Tasks' which I notice place boot files near the beginning of the drive, but which also gets completely undone by most defrag tools including Windows Defrag in XP - can't speak for other OSes since I only have XP:

This tool performs the following command:

 

rundll32.exe advapi32.dll' date='ProcessIdleTasks

 

Note: Microsoft BootVis forces ProcessIdleTasks to run before it profiles your system, which is why people think BootVis optimizes your system's boot speed (BootVis itself does not optimize your system at all).

 

From MSDN:

"The file placement optimization, which is done no more often than once every three days, is an example of a task that is carried out when the system is deemed to be idle.

System Restore and other features of Windows XP also attempt to defer some work until the system is deemed to be idle. There are also some done-once-after-setup work items that also operate under the Idle Task Scheduling mechanisms.

All of these "idle tasks" are controllable by a system API in advapi32.dll: ProcessIdleTasks.

The API's sole purpose is to allow benchmarks a simple way to force any pending idle tasks to be executed immediately, without having to wait a lengthy period of time."

 

As you can see from the MSDN blurb, there are many things that can fall under 'idle tasks' which will be executed when you run this tool. It can take quite a long time to run if your system has a lot of pending tasks.

 

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