Thanx and request

[Lutzifer]

Hi there,
i recently found JKDefrag through a recommendation on a random website when i searched for information about windows prefetching. I have used countless defrag programs in the past and have been frustrated with nearly all of them (my first encounter with norton speed disk many years ago was nearly the only good one, and it wasnt even a particularly good program either). And i have to say that JKDefrag gave me back what all those programs took away. Enthusiasm and believe in defragging. It s lightning fast, organizes the disk very well and speeds up the system noticably in my case. The great screensaver feature is also superb, as it doesnt bloat the system with yet another guardian background-program for some superduper auto-features that dont work half of the time (e.g. diskeeper and similar), but just takes over an otherwise useless feature (i.e. screen"saver") and makes great use of it.

That being said, JKDefrag would be even more awesome, if it would take the layout.ini / prefetch-files into account for its optimization. Is it already in development or is it at least planned for a feature release? Because if so, i ll never touch another defragger again

thanx again for this awesome program =)

[Lundholm]

JKDefrag would be even more awesome, if it would take the layout.ini / prefetch-files into account for its optimization. Is it already in development or is it at least planned for a feature release? Because if so, i ll never touch another defragger again

Hi Lutzifer,

This topic is very interesting and has been covered in various other threads, so look around.

Personally, I have yet to see the Windows boot optimization result in shorter boot times than a JkDefrag option 9 sort. Windows moves the files to the middle of the disk and this is no good, so I have disabled the boot optimization completely!

I think that the planned JkDefrag version 4 will make it possible to optimize the boot even more.

Cheers

[Lutzifer]

yup, i have been snooping around the forum for some time now and found some interesting threads and am pretty hyped about version 4 =)

up untill now i have only run jkdefrag with the default option because i couldnt decide which of the three options 9, 10 and 11 would give the best results speedwise. I guess optimal would be a mix of 9 & 10, right?
Also, is it wise to try to move the pagefile to the beginning of the disk? => disable the pagefile, let jkdefrag move all files to the back of the disk, enable the pagefile again, do a normal defrag ?

[Lundholm]

I guess optimal would be a mix of 9 & 10, right?
Also, is it wise to try to move the pagefile to the beginning of the disk? => disable the pagefile, let jkdefrag move all files to the back of the disk, enable the pagefile again, do a normal defrag ?

Hi Lutzifer,
You are covering some more hot topics here, and you can find several threads on these also!

I must admit that I'm a very boring user. I only like option 9. To me, it must be basic computer science to move the most frequently used files to the beginning of the disk. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't have a usage counter, but most recently used isn't bad.

My computer is also very boring; it doesn't even have a page file. Jeroen says: get some memory and forget about the page file, and I agree   :wink: But you can find some threads discussing the page file.

Cheers

[Lutzifer]

i tried running xp without the pagefile and alot of applications start acting weird or even crash windows. The OS itself also does funny things depending on what services are running. For me it was only insignificantly faster that way, but a hassle most of the time (i tried it when xp was just out and shortly after sp1). My next system might get some serious ram to try it again, but i guess even then i ll run into problems as i use a variety of programs - not to mention games - that are pretty ram-hungry =)

[JDPower]

i tried running xp without the pagefile and alot of applications start acting weird or even crash windows.

I think you'll find you need to have some pagefile regardless of how much memory you have. From MS: "Virtual Memory is always in use, even when the memory required by all running processes does not exceed the amount of RAM installed on the system"
And a good explanation (from here):

Strictly speaking Virtual Memory is always in operation and cannot be ‘turned off’. What is meant by such wording is ‘set the system to use no page file space at all’.

This would waste a lot of the RAM. The reason is that when programs ask for an allocation of Virtual memory space, they may ask for a great deal more than they ever actually bring into use - the total may easily run to hundreds of megabytes. These addresses have to be assigned to somewhere by the system. If there is a page file available, the system can assign them to it - if there is not, they have to be assigned to RAM, locking it out from any actual use.

On the subject of the 'sort by last access' optimisation (in case you haven't already found this already) running anti-virus/malware scans can update the last access time rendering this mode much less effective. I use the 'sort by name' option for my occasional long defrag.

And you're not alone in looking forward to layout/ini support in JKD :wink:

[Robert_S]

Hello,

I thought about what my first posting should be about of but while reading here I decided to make it as an answer...

Layout.ini doesn´t exist on my XP Machine anymore. Why? Because if you can use JKDefrag threre is no reason to keep it!

You have to ask yourself one question:

What is more important?

- fast boot or
- fast system ?

If you set BootOptimization = N and EnablePrefetcher = 0; then delete the content of prefetch folder and reboot then you should make a JKDefrag -a 9 with automatic shutdown when finished and go to bed...

I would set the free space setting to 2%.

When it is done you can be happy with a very quick system and you should only let it frequently defrag with the option "analyze and defrag" (NOT optimize because it would destroy the -a 9 sorting again...)

That´s all !

And you should have a pagefile in every case (at least the size of your RAM - it´s virtual memory and is needed by XP !)

Best place to be on a separate HDD, second best at beginning of C:


Regards Robert

[JDPower]

Layout.ini doesn´t exist on my XP Machine anymore. Why? Because if you can use JKDefrag threre is no reason to keep it!

You have to ask yourself one question:

What is more important?

- fast boot or
- fast system ?

If you set BootOptimization = N and EnablePrefetcher = 0;

But with prefetching disabled like that you have no application prefetching happening either, not just the boot prefetching.

[Lundholm]

On the subject of the 'sort by last access' optimisation (in case you haven't already found this already) running anti-virus/malware scans can update the last access time rendering this mode much less effective. I use the 'sort by name' option for my occasional long defrag.

And you're not alone in looking forward to layout/ini support in JKD :wink:

Hi JDPower,

The optimize option 9 is a little complicated to run, but it is by far the best option for the system drive, so it's worth while. You have to wait a few days after a malware scan, and you should use version 3.16 as discussed in a previous thread:

http://www.kessels.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=587

The alphabetic sort moves Windows files to the end of zone 2, of course; this is not good.

The layout.ini file is no good. It contains a lot of irrelevant junk. JkDefrag version 4 will do much better than that with proper scripts.

Cheers

[Lundholm]

i tried running xp without the pagefile and alot of applications start acting weird or even crash windows. The OS itself also does funny things depending on what services are running. For me it was only insignificantly faster that way, but a hassle most of the time (i tried it when xp was just out and shortly after sp1). My next system might get some serious ram to try it again, but i guess even then i ll run into problems as i use a variety of programs - not to mention games - that are pretty ram-hungry =)

Hi Lutzifer,

Maybe you should try it with an updated SP2? System instability can be caused by many things.

You can check your actual memory usage in Process Explorer, System Information, Commit Charge and Commit History. If these are substantially lower than the physical memory, then you don't need a page file.
Cheers

[JDPower]

The layout.ini file is no good. It contains a lot of irrelevant junk.

Only if prefetching is disabled. Or if you've disabled Windows from running, or don't run manually, the ProcessIdleTasks command as this prunes the prefetch folder and the layout.ini of obsolete entries. Windows does this every three days or so unless its been disabled (which it is on my system as it does a partial defrag which messes JKD's file placement slightly, but I run it manually once a month before a run a long defrag)

[Lundholm]

Only if prefetching is disabled. Or if you've disabled Windows from running, or don't run manually, the ProcessIdleTasks command as this prunes the prefetch folder and the layout.ini of obsolete entries. Windows does this every three days or so unless its been disabled (which it is on my system as it does a partial defrag which messes JKD's file placement slightly, but I run it manually once a month before a run a long defrag)

Even if everything is enabled, you cannot trust the contents of the layout.ini file, IMO.

Naturally, we disable this useless function. It messes the file placement a lot, because it moves important files to a random place! Why you would want to run it manually, I don't understand.

I'm glad that you run JKD afterwards.  

Cheers

[Robert_S]

Layout.ini doesn´t exist on my XP Machine anymore. Why? Because if you can use JKDefrag threre is no reason to keep it!

You have to ask yourself one question:

What is more important?

- fast boot or
- fast system ?

If you set BootOptimization = N and EnablePrefetcher = 0;

But with prefetching disabled like that you have no application prefetching happening either, not just the boot prefetching.

Application Prefetching is absolutely unnecessary -> it prefetches much too many things. If it would be intelligent the thing would be diffrent but it´s stupid!

The only thing that works is boot prefetching - but when enabled your overall performance will decrease because of it!

That´s why you should turn it off, wait a few seconds more for booting an be happy with a fast system.

[JDPower]

Why you would want to run it manually, I don't understand.

As I said, to prune and update the contents of the layout.ini

[Lundholm]

Why you would want to run it manually, I don't understand.

As I said, to prune and update the contents of the layout.ini

I just can't follow you here, but I love to learn new stuff.

Could you explain - in small simple steps - everything you do with XP optimization and JKD optimization, and what benefits you achieve in each step? It must be quite good if you can combine the benefits!