If you are going to defrag your hard disk drive/s,
Defraggler would have to be one of the better free ones. -
http://www.piriform.com/defraggler/download
If you are after a free reg cleaner/cleaner,
CCleaner would have to be one of the better ones; -
http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
Well, I'm not trying to go against the grain here, but I slightly disagree with some of the comments made in this thread.
I regularly defrag all my HDD each month with Defraggler. It's one of those issues where if you asked ten different experts about defragging, your likely to get two or three different views.
I personally find all of my computers seem to work better if they are regularly defragged. To give a balance view, read this independent experts views; -
http://www.smartcomputing.com/edito...y/techsupport/25w10/25w10.asp&ArticleID=31194
So that I don't undermind any of the comments made in this tread, I have cut & pasted most of the above article;
As you continually install and uninstall programs and delete files over time, your hard drive's stored data begins to look like a patchwork quilt. Some programs will be stored in clumps here and there rather than contiguously, depending upon the space that was available when you installed them. Others may be located near the inner edges of your hard drive's disks (where data transfers are slowest), even though an application that you uninstalled has freed up space closer to the outer edges. Similarly, the hard drive may split up large chunks of data and store the chunks in different places. This happens when the drive is too fragmented to have a large enough area of contiguous free space.
Be aware that the performance you gain from defragmenting your hard drive could be moderate or none at all. If your drive wasn't all that fragmented to begin with, you really won't notice it at all. However, you should still defragment your drive on a regular basis because it makes the hard drive operate slightly more efficiently. The time the defragmentation process takes depends upon your hard drive's capacity and how fragmented it is. This could take a few minutes or more than an hour, so don't do this until after you have your work done. You may also have the option to defrag a diskette in your diskette drive, but any performance gain will be minimal. To make the most of the benefits gained from cleaning your hard drive,
you should scan it for errors and defragment it after each minor or major cleaning routine. Uninstalling programs and deleting files can increase fragmentation on your hard drive—a process that scatters data across the drive and requires more system time when Windows and other programs need to find that data. But when you defragment the hard drive, the process packs that data together in a logical sequence, thereby helping your system perform at optimal speeds.
Some computer experts suggest defragmenting your hard drive periodically. A defrag utility reorganizes the data on your hard drive so related files are stored in contiguous blocks rather than scattered in pieces around the drive. The idea is that by physically placing related data together on the drive, access to that data will be faster.
Experts disagree on the effectiveness of defragging. You might give it a try if your hard drive seems especially slow, or if you've completed the other maintenance chores on this checklist and have a hankering to do more. Windows includes Disk Defragmenter, a defrag utility. In WinXP, click Start, All Programs, Accessories, Disk Tools, and Disk Defragmenter. Third-party utilities such as Diskeeper (
www.diskkeeper.com) add extra features.
Cheers, Mac...
