Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Get enough now. Already defragged it once. Went from 33,000+ fragments 
> to 1,000, but.. Still be be nice for more.

You just need to have enough space to put it there. :-)

> Still, point is, if you have memory free, open or not, I see no reason 
> why, if you have free real memory, you couldn't page in some of the file 
> that isn't "in use", page it back out someplace saner, etc. and defrag 
> it that way. 

Of course you could. As I said, the "sane" reason is that not enough people 
want this to justify the difficulty of implementing it. And yes, it's 
difficult. Probably much so more than you think.

> Ironically, its one thing I almost miss from the old 
> Win3.11 days, where you could use Norton's defragger to defrag 
> everything "including" the page file, and shift files you use a lot 
> closer to the start, and unscatter directories, *and* consolidate free 
> space. 

Yeah, when you can shut down all other processes and do it with the machine 
offline, it's a lot easier.

> it will flat out *refuse* to consolidate the free 
> space, even when there is no sane reason to leave a handful of files 
> scattered willy nilly over the remaining disk space.

There is a sane reason, actually. You just don't know what that reason is. 
:-)  One possibility is that they're protected because they're branches of 
files carrying around the encryption key information. Another possibility is 
that they're locked open for writing.

> And, that is the problem. If you need to defrag something like the page 
> file, during boot, how do you do that, if it won't move the stupid files 
> that are in the way? :(

Copy those files to a different disk, delete them, defrag, copy them back.

>> The only XP memory limits I know of was running into the 4G boundary. 
>> And apparently that's a licensing thing - seems XP x86 is happy to use 
>> however much memory you put in there, except that Microsoft tells it 
>> not to.
>>
> Yeah. I know. But, the hack requires changing the boot.sys file.

Different hack, I suspect.

> They 
> managed to make the OS smart enough to boot anyway, if its 
> damaged/missing (mine is missing for some reason), but didn't include 
> any way to rebuild it, if you lost/mangled it. So.. No file, no clue how 
> to write it, and therefor, no means to override the setting.

LMGTFY.  http://mirror.href.com/thestarman/asm/mbr/bootini.htm



-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".

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