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Sysinternals PageDefrag: Good, Bad?

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siouxdax:
Anyone know about PageDefrag? Put out by Sysinternals, which, unfortunately was bought out by Microsoft. I swear by their ProcessExplorer; I use it as a task manager replacement.

I'm curious to know if it's worth anything...

Steven Avery:
Hi Folks,

  Everybody says PageDefrag is excellent.  I loaded it and used the analysis and it said there was hardly any fragmentation anyway.

  In this pic:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx
PageDefrag v2.32

  They show a lot of fragmentation.  However on my system everything is 1 fragment, except the page file which has been 2 or 3.  So any gain would be minimal. I doubt that cluster size changes much, if I am wrong then someone could indicate.

  Reports of difficulties are either zero or minimal (I think the rare difficulty I saw was in NTREGOPT, in both cases you can run ERUNT first).  The NTREGOPT author claimed that there would be refragmentation of something on the next boot anyway, this was interesting but sounded like an overstatement to me.  NTREGOPT does the internal compacting of the registry, a different function, so it wasn't just a competitive dismissal comment, I just think he did not think it through fully.

  As for Mark Russinovich, I have to consider that one of the better Evil Empire acquisitions. They took his expertise because .. he knew XP much better than they do ! :) .. (as shown in the famous Sony Rootkit disaster).  Sysinternals has taken the digestion by Microsoft without indigestion, the Sysinterals tools are readily available, the web-area remains fun to navigate and I have run into quite edgy stuff in the forums and Mark Russinovich maintains a rather amazing blog.   

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/default.aspx
Mark Russinovich's technical blog covering topics such as Windows troubleshooting, technologies and security.

Was other impending creativeness from Sysinternals squashed ?  I can't say so.  The Microsoft acquisition was in a sense an acknowledgement that their view of the internals of Windows had gotten fuzzy, and they needed the best help.  Possibly their best acquisition.

(I am concerned though if they did in fact also partner or acquire with one of the Russian rootkit products .. one of those companies that can walk both sides of the street.  I was thinking of asking about that on the Sysinternals forums.)

  While Microsoft has botched dozens of acquisitions (how are the Foxpro programmer's doing btw ?)  Sysinternals may well have been their absolute best, and seems to have been handled extremely well.  To give credit where its due.

Shalom,
Steven

siouxdax:
Thank you much for the abundant information!

lanux128:
yes, surprisingly Sysinternals' tools have been relevant even after its acquisitions by Microsoft. credit to them. :up:

justice:
It's an excellent program that IMHO is not relevant for 95% of the people that use it or want to use it. I doubt you will see any practical benefit from using it as a home user. I'm of the opinion that defragmentation is something you shouldn't have to worry about or spend any time solving it. Just install JkDefrag in screensaver mode or Perfect Disk in StealthPatrol and your pc will be kept in excellent condition.

You're free to use the minutes and hours gained not fiddling with it by reading and rewarding independent content on this site and others.

I think the only need for PageDefrag is if you've got a very special need on a mision critical server or something. Most defragmentation utilities allow you to defrag on boot so that no files are in use and then you don't need this.

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