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Dec 14

CyberNotes: How To Schedule A Drive To Defragment

Posted in: CyberNotes, Software, Today's Chili, Windows

This article was written on August 31, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

One of the coolest things in Vista is that it will automatically defragment itself once a week. I know very few people who defragment their computers at all and if I heard that someone was doing it once each week I would probably pass out! I don’t know why Microsoft didn’t make it automatic in XP but you can schedule it yourself.

So after you set this up on your computer maybe you should think about setting it up for those people who are constantly complaining that their computer gets slower each day. It may not solve all of their problems but I am sure it will help.

Here are the few steps that you need to do:

Go to Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks.
Double-click on the Add Scheduled Task shortcut.
Click Next and you’ll have to wait for a little while for it to retrieve a list of programs.
Click the Browse button and find the file “C:\WINDOWS\system32\defrag.exe . Once you have found that file click Open.
Select a name and how often you want the task to run (weekly is probably the best option). Click Next.
Select the start time and choose when it will run. Click Next.
Enter the password for the computer. Click Next.
Check the box that says “Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish” and then click Finish.
Now you need to place the drive letter that you want to defragment on the end of the “Run” line. To defragment the primary drive just enter ” %HomeDrive%”. Make sure you place a space between the two: “…\defrag.exe %HomeDrive%”. It should look something like this:
Press OK and you are all set!

See, that was pretty easy and it will take care of defragmenting your drives since we all forget about it or choose not to do it. Now your XP machine is one step closer to being just like Vista.