Ceci n'est pas une blog.

I have spent more than my fair share of time watching disks defragmenting - back when I was a student I had a PC with a 2.5GB drive... at about the time it became "normal" for every piece of software to fill up a CD. My housemate was used to walking in and seeing me staring like a zombie at little coloured squares flashing around the screen - I had to clean and defrag the disk about once a week just to keep things running.

A couple of years ago, we had the same problem again - the 30GB disk on our main PC was rapidly filling up with the "crap" we were collecting - faster than I could burn it off to CD or DVD. JazzMoss used to get pissed off at me whenever I commented on the disk being full (like I could help it), and I was back to defragging and cleaning every couple of days.

But then I got a nice big 300GB disk - which took about a year to get filled again - and I still don't have to do this cleaning-up ritual more than once every few weeks.

But now I have a minor annoyance with our secondary PC (Jazz's old one) - I changed the size of the virtual memory page file (Windows complained it was too small) after which it was no longer a single block on the disk. A fragmented page file can make things a little slower, so of course I wanted to fix that - so I have spent a couple of days doing every single trick I know and trying three different defrag packages - but NONE OF THEM WILL MOVE THE WINDOWS SYSTEM FILES WHICH ARE SPREAD EVENLY ALL OVER THE DISK!

These files, used by Windows itself, are "locked", and as a result there is no space left on the disk with enough room for the bigger page file. But what bugs me is that NO-ONE seems to have a solution that can unlock and move these bloody system files! I remember old Norton SpeeDisk could move the page file and some system files in Win95 while Windows was still running - yet all the systems I've tried recently won't even attempt this. They always want you to reboot - and even then they ALL allow enough of Windows to load and get those damned files locked again before saying the page file can not be defragmented.

Of course, this comes down to crappy Microsoft as usual. Why is it not possible to run defrag from a command-line boot or Windows CD? Why does it allow such a mess to build up in the first place? Why is there no administrator-mode at boot with a simple text menu for cleaning up disks etc. without loading up Windows?

From looking around the net, it seems there really is only one solution - I have to make "the Ultimate Boot CD" ( http://www.ubcd4win.com/ ), a bootable CD including all those administration tools that SHOULD HAVE BEEN ON THE WINDOWS CD IN THE FIRST PLACE. The only thing is that since they can't let you download something with Windows on it (obviously), you have to jump through a few hoops to create a custom CD based on their files, your system and a Windows CD. Sigh.

Perhaps I won't bother - I'll leave DisKeeper running in the background for a few weeks and see if it magically fixes things when I'm not looking. Fingers crossed...