How to turn off auto defrag in XP?

[Slaimus]

If I leave the computer idle for about 10 minutes, DfrgFat.exe starts running and seems to be automatically defragging my files. I know this cause when I noticed disk activity when the computer was idle, I left file monitor running to see what was causing it. I do not have any items in scheduled tasks, where else should I look to turn this off?

this comp has SP1 and is using FAT32

 

[woodie1]

I'll bet you have 'indexing service' on.

EDIT: Forgot to tell you how to disable it.

Start>Search>Change Preferences>and turn indexing service off

 

[Slaimus]

That's not it, it's disabled
thanks though

 

[woodie1]

Hmm, is this Home or Pro?

 

[Slaimus]

Pro

 

[woodie1]

It may be normal

Here is some of the text:


"One big difference between Windows XP and earlier versions is that the optimization is automatically done at idle times. When the machine is idle for 10 minutes or you run defrag c: -b, Windows XP will use that time to optimize the most used files. Through monitoring application load and boot up, Windows XP's determines which application and code files are used, and moves them to a contiguous file space."

Hope this helps.

 

[Slaimus]

Hmmm I never noticed any defragging on my other xp machine. Maybe it's because this one has an old 8.4gig that is loud as hell. Is there any way to disable this behavior? It will make this HD die a lot earlier if it just keeps defragging non stop when I leave it on.

 

[woodie1]

Agreed. Maybe some more knowledgeable people will come in and help you.

 

[Slaimus]

Yeah, thanks for all your help

 

[prosaic]

It won't make the older driver die a premature death. The optimization routines, which occur in a "relaxed" manner, will make that hard drive's work load under stress (at boot time and during application loads) MUCH easier because the optimized prefetch routines mean that the heads won't have to rattle all over the place to load stuff. The optimization routines also mean that your boot times and application start times will gradually improve over time, though the change might not be very noticeable on many systems. There is actually somewhat of a trade-off between application prefetch time and OS boot time as prefetching commonly used application loaders can cause boot times to increase slightly. But it also can markedly increase the speed with which commonly used applications will start. This is especially true of applications like Office.

The above musings assume that you have some more-or-less routine ways in which you use the system. If you use the machine in radically different and random ways between sessions then, I suppose, the optimization routines might not be so advantageous for you.

If you really wish to disable the behavior you can do so through direct registry editing or through use of a utility like Xteq's X-Setup. If you use that utility you'll find the prefetch settings under System \ File System \ Windows XP Prefetching.

Even if you turn off Prefetching you will likely see some activity of the hard drive at idle time -- on any drive with one or more NTFS partitions. That would be journaling at work. That item can't be turned off unless you use a different file system. In fact, it may be journaling, and not prefetching, that you're seeing.

Regardless of the fact that you're finding this behavior to be particularly noticeable I'm certain that it is not an activity that will reduce the life of that hard drive. This behavior is quite leisurely in comparison to most other hard drive read/write activity. It's occuring at the rate of a few seeks / sec. at most as compared to something in the neighborhood of a hundred seeks / sec. at boot time or application loading time on an unoptimized, fragmented system. On older, slower drive the activity can seem intense, but that's probably just a single long write session in the process of optimization that you're seeing. That activity is an easy one for the drive to perform, unless it's already on its last legs.

- prosaic