NoonName wrote:

1) what is the best defragger that will handle Win XP with HDD ?

2) does a laptop with a SSD ever need defragging ? When ?


I don't know why this question is cross-posted to the Win7
group, as you're not asking about Windows 7.

1) The built-in WinXP defragmenter is pretty good. It packs to
the left, and tries not to leave gaps. I've seen worse
defragmenters. And nobody wants to pay $39.95 for some
piece of crap they can't transfer to a second computer.

2) This was answered by a Microsoft employee. Normally an
SSD does not need to be defragmented, because it has
zero seek time. But there is at least one corner case,
where it *might* need to be defragmented.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheRe...YourSS D.aspx

"... Storage Optimizer will defrag an SSD once a month
if volume snapshots are enabled. This is by design and
necessary due to slow volsnap copy on write performance...
"

When the file system takes shadow copies into consideration,
the performance of the file system can be degraded with time,
unless the Storage Optimizer "does something" :-) If you don't
use shadow copies, then it should not need to do anything.

WinXP isn't likely to know what an SSD is, so don't
defragment an SSD on purpose there. Later OSes, the ones
that prepare partitions on megabyte boundaries (Vista+)
are more likely to have some logic to identify an
SSD and behave responsibly towards it. WinXP is
too old to handle such a situation well.

As well, if you clone WinXP from a HDD to a new SSD,
you should "re-align" the partition. This improves
performance by putting clusters on flash block
boundaries. It's a bit easier on the drive. I
don't use SSD for WinXP, and wouldn't even think
of doing that. To me, Win10 absolutely needs SSD
for the boot drive, because Win10 is such a maintenance
pig (it's scanning, scanning, scanning all the time).
Save your SSD for the OS that really needs it.

HTH,
Paul