The first tool I want to call out in my Essential Tools series, and the inspiration for the series, is one from a company called Piriform the tool is one that I’ve been looking a long time for… a real drive defragmenter.

As a systems administrator, I’m sure you know defragmentation can kill the performance of a system and that it doesn’t take long before a drive is defragmented! Plus, you probably know the frustration of spending hours defragging a drive to only find out that after defragging one, maybe two or three, times that there is still a file with hundreds of fragments!

I absolutely hate that! Three hours out of my life and the best you can do is leave a file with 878 fragments?!? I’m from back “in the day”, when DOS 6.22′s defrag utility actually defragged the hard drive and also did a file level defrag.

Sure there are some apps that do that, but they charge out the nose for the software and, lets face it, not everyone works at a fortune 500 company with a million dollar software budget to spend on disk defragmentation software.

There is a tool that does this, does it quite well, and better yet is FREE! This tool is called Defraggler.

It will defrag your drive, like most other defrag software applications, but it goes one step further… It will allow you to choose an individual file to defragment!

Plus, for those of you that are batch scripters or command line people (nothing wrong with that), there’s a command line tool installed that they don’t mention, df.exe, in addition to the standard Windows version!

Straight from the command line help we see how powerful this can be if you have a file or folder that has heavy disk activity:

df C:
Defrag drive C:

df “C:\Program Files”
Defrag “C:\Program Files” folder.

df “C:\Program Files” /S
  Defrag “C:\Program Files” folder and recurses into sub folders.

df “C:\Windows\*.exe”
Defrag all executables inside “C:\Windows” folder.

So check it out, I’m sure you’ll find it to be one of those tools that you simply add to your tool belt or boot disk.

Until next time….