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It is a Windows defrag program. The download is about 300KB and it works great! They also have a background defrager called BuzzSaw that is also about 300KB
http://www.dirms.com/

Yeah AV *is* an extra cost. You're right there. You shouldn't have to update them manually though. Any good corporate AV solution will have systems for managing and reporting on AV deployments.

WSUS is a free tool from Microsoft for managing the testing and deployment of hotfixes.

Log files (IMO, the number one annoyance with windows systems) can be managed with scripts by using scheduled tasks, as can other mundane tasks like defragmenting. For Windows 2000 and NT4 which don't come with command line defragmentors there are free tools avaialable that will do the job. Email reports can be sent via email by piping (c:\maintenance.cmd >> c:\daily_report.txt) the output of your scripts to a textfile and using freely available command-line mailer tools to send them.

Security and other logs can be dumped to a freely available database automatically using freely avaiable tools.

One very valid complaint is that Windows doesn't come with these tools by default. Once you get everything together though, life becomes much easier.

I won't argue with you that UNIX is easier. An OpenBSD/Postfix box I set up about two years ago has not required a security patch yet, and if not for power outages and physical moves, would have two years of uptime right about now.

I've mentioned it elsewhere already. But try PageDefrag and Buzzsaw.

The first one will defragment your Windows pagefile on each boot. And Buzzsaw will defragment recently accessed files in the background, much less intrusive than Diskkeeper. Both are freeware tools.

It explains what a paging file is and lists the differences between a swapfile and a paging file.

There is no difference.. He says that swapfiles would swap whole processes. I beg you pardon? Working on whole processes hasn't been the case since 'multiprogramming' on third generation computers (around 1965-1980).

btw, a good program to defrag your Windows page file is PageDefrag

Together with Dirms & Buzzsaw, you can keep your disk defragmented for free. Especially Buzzsaw is nice since it will defragment recently accessed files in the background.

For windows NT 4.0 and up there is Buzzsaw from http://www.dirms.com/. It does on the fly defragmentation in the background when the file has been accessed.

Works like a charm.

Why do we need 3rd party applications like Dirms* to keep NTFS defragmented? Of course there is no silver bullet, but some on-the-fly defragmentation wouldn't be that difficult to build into the OS. Mac OS X does this too already.

* Warning, ugly site, good program.

Basically you need to research what you are installing on your machine. That means using google, word of mouth, and your own deep digging before you put any ?cleaning? program on your machine.

I totally agree, last night I decided to google for a free disk defragmenter. I found DIRMS.

In addition to defragmenting my drive more thoroughly than the defrag built into XP does, it also reduces interstitial space and can reclaim usable space on your drive. I have a 120 GB hdd and it recovered 1.5 GB of interstitial space.

Had I just stuck to "reviews" published in magazines and other industry sources I would have never found out about a really sweet defrag program.

Regardless of the subject; Spyware, Defrag, Gas mileage, whatever, you're much better off to do your own research and listen to what users like you have to say about it.

LK

For your defragmentation needs, you could also try buzzsaw.

Also, sysinternal's pagedefrag and contig are pretty usefull.

Not that defragmenting your hard drive will give you enormous performance boosts, though.

The first thing I do when I sit down in front of an XP machine is turn of the unnecessary themes/skinning, animations and shadows, unwanted services (services.msc), unwanted start up programs (try sysinternal's autoruns), and of course the adaware/spybot thing.

Also, I usually set the swap file to be some fixed number of megabytes (4 times RAM or some ludicrous amount like that), and make sure IE's and mozilla's cache sizes are pretty minimal (i.e. 10MB should be enough) if the machine is on a broadband connection.

If these programs can do anything more to optimize my setup, they're welcome, but I wonder what exactly they do..

I use Windows handly little batch language for all kinds of tasks on my domain - from scheduling tasks, to archiving logs, to cleaning up old files. You really should learn a thing or two about Windows before blindly bashing it.

Here is just one example.

Buzzsaw and Dirms -- I admit, the site looks a little seedy, but I've used both of these programs on several machines for upwards of a year and they've done a superb job of keeping my NTFS disks defragmented.