Why does the harddisk takes up the space while defragmenting on windows vista?
Question by rose: Why does the harddisk takes up the space while defragmenting on windows vista?
Yesterday I defragmented my laptop. During defragmenting 30GB free space in C drive begins to reduce,now it is 22 GB. So I cancelled it. I was afraid if it would takes up the full space. Normally defragmenting free up some space in harddisk and increase system speed , then why does it takes up the space? But now my pc is faster than before. And how can I free up more space in harddisk?
Best answer:
Answer by LoverOfWine
Defragmenting does free (and shouldn’t take up) disk space. It just moves blocks around so that segments of files are together, and free space segments are together.
The apparent taking up of disk space may be caused by the moving around of blocks (depends on the package). To be safe defraggers copy a block, update tables, delete old blocks, update tables.
To free space best thing to do is to do a Start | run and type cleanmgr, click ok. That will remove files that are temporary and no longer required.
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There may be some system restore points created during the course of a defrag…that is a well known issue in Vista..not an unusual thing. These system restore points may take up significant amount of space. So check for and delete the system restore points you don’t need, and reboot. This should give you back your space.
Also I recommend using Diskeeper to defrag, you can check out a free 30 day trial-
http://www.diskeeper.com/defrag.aspx
Diskeeper runs very well in the background mode and defrags even under low free space. Also when defragging vista, always use the VSS defrag option as recommended by Diskeeper, this will prevent unnecessary shadow copy activity. Diskeeper is the only defragger which has this useful option AFAIK.