Some Notes on the Machines

SpaceSniffer is free of charge (donations encouraged), highly recommended, very very fast, orders of magnitude faster than WinDirStat, and works on drives, folders, and UNC paths. Not fancy, but oh so fast & functional.

Appears excellent on the desktop.

http://www.puransoftware.com/Puran-Defrag.html

AnyBurn seems to be possibly the current best light & powerful CD/DVD toolbox item:

www.anyburn.com/download.php

It’s available in 64-bit and 32-bit versions. ImgBurn was go-to for a long time, but it hasn’t had updates since 2013. Quite a few others are gone too. But the old reliable CDBurnerXP is still being kept up to Windows 10 as well:

cdburnerxp.se/

The command is CONTIG (also available in 64-bit as CONTIG64), and it is a Sysinternals:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/contig

You’ll want to put the appropriate binary in C:\Windows. Run it like this, in administrative CMD, it will get all of the hiddens it can for C drive (this is 64-bit):

contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$Mft
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$LogFile
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$Volume
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$AttrDef
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$Bitmap
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$Boot
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$BadClus
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$Secure
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$UpCase
contig64 -nobanner -accepteula C:$Extend

Notice the distinct lack of slashes in the above!

The command is CONTIG (also available in 64-bit as CONTIG64), is a Sysinternals:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/contig

It defrags, and does it very well. It does it file by file. Here’s a command probably suitable for background operation on a whole C drive, on a 64-bit machine, quiet mode:

start /LOW contig64 -s -q C:\*

Small and sweet.

https://www.disktuna.com/da-disktuna/

Recently acquired advice. Better speed, less wear on the drive. It is a Windows service by that name.

Found this today.

• A two-month-old laptop with a SanDisk SD8SN8U-256G-1006 SSD for its C: drive, Windows 10.
• Windows had recognized the drive as a standard hard drive, not an SSD, and the laptop had slowed down a lot very recently.
• Installed the SanDisk SSD Dashboard, ran TRIM, and scheduled weekly TRIM operations.
• Laptop much faster.

Here’s a tool. Run this once as administrator on the drive to check, wait 20 seconds and do it again, and if it says you’re good, you are.

http://files.thecybershadow.net/trimcheck/

We can control the autorepair facility in NTFS, with fsutil repair. Under Windows 8/2012 it will list entries of a volume’s corruption log, initiate repair, query and set the self-healing state, query the corruption state, and wait for repairs to complete.