What's a good freeware program for defragmenting hdd?

[Peegee]

And while we're at the idea of freeware tools, what about registry cleaners etc? I can't install norton for some reason, not that norton is the end-all best software for it, but it did do the job for me ;p

[NM]

EasyCleaner (http://www.docsdownloads.com/Tier1/easycleaner.htm) is a decent registry cleaner.

[Shoeberto]

...the Windows system defragger?

[Yamaneko]

Defragging is pretty much useless on newer setups.

[crono_logical]

Or well planned setups where you've seperated the system/program/temp/different types of user data completely :p Or on decent non-Windows filing systems :p

But if you have to defrag, just use the built-in Windows one, that does the job well enough :p Or if you have enough disk space on another partition (preferably another physical hard drive), it's much faster to copy all the data to the spare partition, reformat the partition you want to defrag, then move everything back, especially for very large partitions :D

[Peegee]

..is this advice serious? It's wacky enough to work, yet is hilariously tedious.

[crono_logical]

The copying data to another partition and back? Yes, and it works too, because when you do the second copy phase shifting all the data back, it gets written back unfragmented by default :D It's not really tedious, you just do 3 things (copy, format, move) instead of one thing (defragment), and it should be faster too, especially if the spare partition is on a seperate physical disk :p One warning though, if it's an NTFS drive you want to do this do, make sure you use a spare NTFS partition if you want to keep permissions etc. :p Plus I'm not too sure how well it'll work on encrypted files unless you use a user that's designated a recovery agent or something on that machine :p Safest for FAT32 though or if you don't care about file permissions :p

[Yamaneko]

Even the WINDOWS directory?

[crono_logical]

No, it won't work with the Windows/system partitions because of files in use :p You could still move/move back other stuff on the partition to defragment at least those files though :p

[Yamaneko]

It just seems like a lot of work. Plus, you wouldn't be able to move everything from Program Files, Documents and Settings without disabling services. We don't even know what PG's setup is. :p If you're Windows installation is running so slow that you can notice a difference you might as well reformat.

[Peegee]

No it's just one of my weekly things to do with 'maintenance' that I do with most machines, and this machine lacks defragging as of now.

But if it's pointless nm.