[BubbaJudge]

Super-Simple Defrag Automation

Quote

Hi Fred! Some time ago, I began following your excellent advice and used MS Task Scheduler to schedule nightly maintenance - disk cleanup, scan disk, defrag, and a Norton Antivirus scan. The problem I have found - all the more so with Windows XP - is that defrag requires manual selection of options (such as selecting the drive, clicking "OK"). As a result, although scheduler calls up defrag, it doesn't run. Can you tell me how to work around this?  
Thanks, Gene

Actually, this is one of those rare things where a very, very simple approach works best.
For Win98/Me/XP (Home and Pro), just run NotePad, and enter one line into a new file:
defrag c:
Save the file and name it "defrag c.bat" or any similar, obvious name ending in ".bat". You then can click on the file to manually trigger a defrag of C:. or you can use Task Scheduler to run the batch file whenever you want, such as late at night.
If you have other drives, you can either defrag them via separate batch files (a "defrag d.bat" file would contain just the line "defrag d:" for example), or you can enter the lines serially into one batch file.
I have a file called "defrag_all.bat" for example, and it contains these lines:
defrag c:
defrag d:
defrag e:
defrag f:
When run, defrag_all.bat defrags the drives one after the other.

[BubbaJudge]

of course if you use norton, its built in.