Do You Still Have Too Much White Space After Defragmenting Your Hard Drive?

Monday, March 23rd, 2009 at 4:21 pm

Defragmenting the hard drive of your Windows XP computer system on a regular (monthly minimum) basis is one of the most important general computer maintenance lessons you could ever master.

Your XP machine will have come with the Disk Defragmenter tool. You can access it by going to your Start menu -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Right click on “Disk Defragmenter” and “pin it” to the Start Menu. This will save you a few steps the next time you need it. While you’re at it you may as well pin “Disk Cleanup” from System Tools also.

There are other 3rd party defragmentation tools out there, but Windows Disk Defractmenter does a pretty good job…

…except when, after defragmenting your drive, there’s this block of white space where it should be blue.

This white space is where your “pagefile” resides. Your pagefile is dynamically resized by Windows as needed to make sure you have enough virtual memory to serve the needs of running applications. Over time the pagefile can become defragmented as a result of this resizing leading to a decline in performance.

The thing with Windows XP’s Disk Defragmenter is that it cannot defragment the pagefile, which is why you have the whitespace. So, if you’re thinking of buying some 3rd party software to handle this for you, I’ll save you the bucks with this little workaround.

I wish I would have taken some screen shots of my hard drive before I defragmented it.

Anyway, before starting, you should do a “disk cleanup” first accessed under “System Tools”. Select all that apply. Once done:

1. Defragment your hard drive as you normally do.

Now, in order to defragment the pagefile (where all the white space is), we need to:

2. Delete the Pagefile first.

Go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced
Under Performance click the “Settings” button.
…and click the Advanced Button Again.
Under “Virtual memory” click the “Change” button.
Note the selected drive and the initial and maximum paging file size and write these two figures down
Select the “No paging file” radio button
Click “Set” and the OK to finish.

3. You may need to reboot your computer and defragment your hard drive again.

4. Finally, you need to re-create the pagefile again. Just follow the steps from above re-enter the two paging file sizes.

Now, having said all this you need to know that sometimes Windows is fickle. I did this technique on 2 Windows XP computers I have. On my first computer I had no problems and by the time I was done, I had no excess white space on my hard drive.

My second computer, however, required that I had to defrag my hard drive yet a third time.

Somehow, defragmentation left the white space intact after deleting my pagefile. But after re-inserting the two pagefile sizes I rebooted the computer again. This time the third defragmentation put the pagefile further along the hard drive and closed the white gap up wonderfully.

Fast Tip: Defrag your hard drive before installing any new software.

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