http://www.openaccess.co.za/BlackAndWhiteInc/Defrag.htm You will find a great free defragger bundle. Have a look, Ray, I would be interested in your assessment of it. I use it and never have to manually defrag. It's the only free defragger I've met that actually works.

   That website has a list of fourteen free defraggers and sixteen commercial defraggers.  He also plugs other programs that have nothing to do with defragging.  So when you talk about the only free defragger that actually works, I don't know which one you are talking about.
   The defragger that comes with Windows is also free and has served me perfectly well through the years.
   I defrag only about once a year and yet I never notice an improvement of speed.  I am sure that there is an actual improvement, but it is not noticeable.  I would rather spend my time doing more constructive things than defragging my drives.
   Some people make a big thing about defragging and spend a lot of money on it but in my opinion it is not very important or productive (you asked for my assessment).

Oops. gone senile. JkDefrag is the free defragger that I suggest folk check out. I am in nyc for the infosecurity in javits center, meets with my publisher, plus partying with kith and kin, and whemed-over by news from my daughter that she is carrying twins. some prospective grandpas may go a lil hmmmm at the news.

JkDefrag. try the bundle.

excuse the double reply. I have the opposite result. I do a weekly cleaning of all trash files accumulated, jdefrag works in the background, and a chkdsk. My system noticeably runs faster without problems. I, of course, clean trash with your, A1Click Ultra PC Cleaner, and RegVac; it is because of these that WinRescue has little to do, except compact sometimes. I truly believe that if I didn't have WinRescue that my system would crash. My main system, an ancient 1.2 GHz AMD,  is faster than my neighbor's 2.5 GHz Intel. I introduced him to a cleaning without yourn, and he marvelled at the increase in speed. I'll ask him when I return if he has ordered A1,WR, and RV; Jdefrag, I believe, is the fourth musketeer.

I also use JKDefrag, but I think that posting this extract from the HTML help file may save somebody's machine, since people sometimes cause themselves serious damage by using low-level utilities without reading the warnings.  Like the warning in RegVac about deleting whole branches, they are NOT just boilerplate:

"Some data on an NTFS partition may become corrupted after you restart a Windows XP-based computer that uses a SATA hard disk drive. This is not a JkDefrag bug but a Microsoft defragmentation API bug. Microsoft have released a bugfix, see:  Bugfix 941715"

I have used the MS bugfix with no problems.

Also, there are a lot of useful tricks in JKDefrag which can only be run in the original program from the command line; it's worth reading about them.  There are several third-party GUIs now, but I haven't tried any of them.

"and whemed-over by news from my daughter that she is carrying twins. some prospective grandpas may go a lil hmmmm at the news."
I don't know about that, but you should have seen me the day that my 40-something-year-old wife told me that she was carrying twins.

Thanks.
C.