Sysinternals and PageDefrag

If you run a Windows computer and are more ambitious about fixing problems then throwing your hands up in the air and sobbing softly, you should know about http://www.sysinternals.com/. It’s an excellent collection of freeware windows diagnostic programs. They give you excellent access into the inner workings of your Windows computer.

The utility on the Sysinternals website I found recently is called PageDefrag. Hopefully you’re on top of things enough to know that every drive in a windows system needs to be defragmented once in a while. Defragmentation is the process where some program gathers all the pieces of each file on your hard drive that may be scattered around your hard drive, and puts the pieces in one place, speeding up future accesses of your files. If you’ve defragmented before, you may know that any files that are “in use” are not defragmented by the standard windows defragmenter program. Some files that are always in use are the most important ones to the proper and speedy functioning of your system. These include, most notably, the page file (swap) and the Registry. Enter PageDefrag. It’s a very simple program. You run it, and it tells you if some of these important files are fragmented. If they are, you can schedule PageDefrag to defragment these files on the next boot of your computer, before they start being used by the operating system. Since these files are accessed all the time, it’s a great efficiency boost to your system if they are defragmented.

Other programs on Sysinternals that I love:

Regmon

See Registry access in real-time! Useful if you have some lame program (like Palm Desktop) that installs the proper registry settings only to Administrator. You can see which entries are set, and copy them to other users that want to use the program. (btw–Don’t get me started on what a crappy program Palm Desktop is…)

Filemon

Continuing in the Jamaican naming scheme, Filemon is a real-time monitor of file accesses.

Process Explorer

Like a yummy graphical version of the Unix ps or top, Process Explorer lets you see lots of useful information about all of the processes running currently on your Windows computer. But perhaps the best part of this program is that it lets you search for which process has a particular filehandle open. If you’ve ever had Windows prevent you from deleting a file (“Access is denied”) because it thinks some program is accessing the file, you can track down the process in question. AND, if you’re very brave and bold, you can use the program to force the filehandle closed without actually shutting down the process. Pretty scary, eh kids?

and Many Many More!

Great stuff