problems with ultimate defrag | Tech Support | Forums

Is Ultimate Defrag entirely ignoring the high performance files or are only some of them being moved?  Remember that if a file is in use then it can not be moved.  Keeping that in mind then in all likelyhood your high performance files are in use or else they wouldn't be high performance to start with.

Can you give some examples of what high performance files aren't being moved?  Also, are any high performance files being moved?

The *best* way to do a defrag is from Safe Mode on a live system.  You could also remove the drive and attach it externally to another computer and defrag it that way.  Remember to disable any security software you have when you defrag, especially if it has real time protection because that will significantly hinder both the speed and effectiveness of the defrag.

-Evan

There are some defraggers that will do a boot defrag, but I'm not sure if Ultimate Defrag will or not.  It's been a while since I used it.  You need to be very careful when dealing with boot defrags or placing the drive in another machine (or an external enclousure).  I say that because files that are normally protected can be modified in that state.

For instance I used a utitilty to defrag my MFT (master file table) cause I wanted to fine tune the machine.  This was a boot defrag situation…problem was that the utility was written for Windows XP and earlier and I was using Vista.  Both use NTFS for the file system but they use different versions (XP=NTFS 4 Vista=NTFS 5).  The app "optimized" my MFT thinking (I assume) it was NTFS 4 which effectively destroyed my entire MFT.  The MFT tells the OS what the file layout is and after this I just had gibberish.  I was able to use a recovery utitilty to find and backup my files, but my Vista install was completely shot.  My point is that back-up before you mess with stuff like the boot record or MFT and make sure that you use a utility that is aware of your OS.  So if Ultimate Defrag doesn't support Vista and you're using Vista…BE CAREFUL.  Have an image backup of your install just to be safe.

Going back to your last question (sorry for getting side tracked…), you could move all the high performance files for optimization if you aren't running the defragger from the drive that contains the OS you are running the program from.  In other words…you need to have the drive installed as some form of secondary drive.  You really aren't going to see enough of a performance gain to really rationalize doing this, however.

Has this helped at all or have I completely missed the point?

-Evan