On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:52:26 -0800 (PST), Gas Bag
wrote:

I've recently installed Windows XP Home on a partitioned hard drive.
The C: Drive (which contains the operating system) is about 10GB, and
the D: Drive is about 18GB.

Note that when you defragment two partitions on a single drive, you
may actually make matters worse. Defragmentation usually works by
moving the files as close together as possible, and usually as close
to location zero within the partition as possible. So your data ends
up in two "bands", and each time you reference the other partition,
you have to cross the gap between the bands.

The answer to this is to defragment the lower-placed partition towards
the upper end of its range, and the higher placed partition towards
the lower end of its range. I believe that jkdefrag can do this, but
you might have to force the issue by requesting a gap at the bottom of
the lowest partition.

If you do things this way, then your data ends up on one band, which
spans the divide between your partition.

However, in most cases the problem is insufficient RAM, which causes
swapping. That can really hammer your disk. Your Process Explorer can
tell you if this is happening a lot - look at column "Page Fault
Delta" (which you'll have to add - it is not in the default columns
displayed)

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk