So I was stupid when I built my new system and only allocated 4GB to my system drive partition. That's plenty for the system itself; I've got plenty of free space. The problem is that the Windows 2000 defragmenter won't run anymore on that drive. Even though I have well over the 15% required free space for defragmenter to operate, only 11% of the drive is available for the defragmenter.

I understand from a quick online search that this is because the defragmenter requires a large unfragmented portion of the hard drive to operate properly. So if I'd made my system drive 5GB instead of just 4, things would probably be fine. But what's done is done . . .

I also know that I can use a third-party defragmenter to get the job done. I've used up my free 30-day trial of O&O Defrag, which is reputed to be the best defragmenter out there, but even though I'd like to buy the full program eventually, it's just not in the budget to buy it right now.

This leaves me in the unpleasant situation of having no apparent way to defrag my system drive. Is there any way around this problem?

Thanks,

Matthew
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The basic formula for determining how much space to allocate is around 2 times more than you think you'll need per partition, that's pretty safe.

In the program partition, you can do the following to create more space:

set the target directory for 'my documents' to a big data partiition
set the store directory for your email client to the data directory.

Windows by itself, with most of the big apps, only takes about 3 gigabytes, give or take.

Other things you can do is double check the IE cache, that sets to a huge default value.

Check the trashcan size, that defaults to 10% of the partition size, or 400mB.

Set it to 80 or so.

If after doing all this you still dont' have enough space, you'll need to repartition the drive with something like partition magic. You can do that with the os installed, but
DON'T TRY RUNNING MULTIPLE PARTITIONING OPERATIONS AT ONCE. DO ONE AT A TIME, THAT'S THE GREEN CIRCLE BUTTON.
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Hey, thanks for the ideas, I'd already tried all of those but you prompted me to do some more checking and I found a 211MB user.dmp file in my DrWatson folder. I wasn't sure what that was for, so instead of deleting it I just moved it over to another partition. That freed up enough space that I got the defragmenter to run successfully.

I've learned my lesson well; I just had to setup another W2K system today and I set the system partition to 6gb. Thanks for the formula of how to determine how large to create each partition; the unfortunate thing is, what to do when all you have is a 40 gig drive and count on needing it all? ;)
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My current OS partition is about 10 Gig, 5.5 is used, 4.5 is free.

That's after 4 years of using the same OS, more or less, no data except emails, all various programs I use or am testing.

I used to set it to 6 gigabytes, but have found for standard uses, instructed to keep all files in the 'my documents' directory, which is physically targetted to the data directory, same with emails, that will never be outgrown no matter what they install (except games). Currently I have my thunderbird email in the OS directory, that's about 300 mB give or take. There was a Tbird bug with using a different partition, though a nightly build had solved that issue, but I still don't completely trust it.

I've resized my OS partition a few times, now when I set up a box I tend to just make it about 10 gig for OS, then divide the rest into logical chunks, though I have a lot of OS's installed, for my test OS's I allocate about 3-4 gig per OS, which is fine.

Partition Magic Warning, Part 2
If you use Partition magic carefully, and execute each partitioning command one at a time, you should have no trouble with resizing. However:
WHEN PARTITION MAGIC ASKS IF YOU WANT TO MAKE EMERGENCY RECOVERY DISKS, DO IT.
You need two floppies for that. That's a step in the Partition Magic install process, don't skip it. Respect this software, it can seriously f@#ck up your computer if you screw up, but if you are careful it's very reliable.

Hard drive capacities
If the harddrive is 40 gig just use it til it gets full, or actually about 75% full per partition, any more than that and the harddrive has to do a lot of work to place the data, has to jump around more and more.

Then when the 40 gig drive is full in each partition, it's time to add a new drive, you can add a second one if it's IDE to the same channel, I've had very bad luck running a hard drive and a cd-rom/dvd type unit on the same IDE channel, I don't do that anymore.

With SATA of course all you do is add a second sata hard drive and away you go. Hard drive prices are pretty low, you can pick up a 40 gig Maxtor for about 50-60 dollars nowadays.

Windows Cache, Swap, and Recycle bin settings
Windows is very annoying when it comes to setting caches and recycling bin sizes, it's like they never picked up on the fact that we aren't using 500 mB hard drives any more, the default is still 10% I think, which is totally absurd. You have to go in and set this manually for each drive/partition, by the way, you can't set an overall % size for each unit.

Or just use the real thing, Linux
Things like this is what makes you realize that having some control over your OS like you get with Linux maybe isn't such a bad thing.

Re that, my current tests would lead me to suggest the FTP install of SUSE 9.1, or if you can get it, 9.2 professional, though currently that's not a free download.

Set the Windows Swap File size Manually
Another setting that MS thoughtfully doesn't ask you about is the swap file size, it usually doesn't need to be as big as 150%, which is the default, if you use 512 mB of ram or more.

To change this:
Right click on my computer icon, select 'Properties'
Select the 'Advanced' tab.
Click 'Performance Options'
Click 'Change'
If you have 512 mB or more of ram, type in 512 and 512 for initial and maximum size, then click the 'Set' button. If you have less than 512 you probably want to go with 50% greater for initial and maximum, but use the same size for both no matter what.

Then click apply and OK.

This will save you another few megabytes. Plus your OS partition will know more or less how big it is

In linux of course it uses a separate swap partition that is created on install, that's the real way to do it, that way you don't have to worry about stuff like this at all. I tried that on windows and ended up toasting a hard drive, so I just leave the swap on the OS partition now, windows just isn't very good at this kind of stuff.

Clean out your Winnt Temp directory
I asked one of our networking guys about this, he assures me that when he de-trojans a computer, the first thing he does is just delete all the temp files from your temp directory, it's all junk. I thought some was useful, but he says it's all just duplicates, a lot gets left there if the power goes off, or the computer crashes. Plus it's a favorite install location for trojans, spyware, etc.

When I'm having capacity issues, I go through each major folder except Winnt, right click it, select properties, then look for really big sizes, files like you found. Sometimes the temp directory is really crammed with junk. I just checked mine, for example, and it had 20 mB of junk in it. When you delete big piles of junk files, once you are sure you didn't make a mistake, empty the recycle bin, this will create even more space.

Think about dumping Dr. Watson
I'm not a fan of those utilities, I've seen them mess up too many computers, though some people I've read have had good luck with them.
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