Defragmenting hard drives is something that is often unnecessary, but when it is necessary, most people run the built-in Windows “Disk Defragmenter” utility. It’s serviceable, but there is a better option: JkDefrag.

There’s a few things that make JkDefrag an improvement over what Windows offers:

• It runs on anything that mounts like a disk drive — including USB drives and memory sticks.
• You can run it from Windows, from a command line, or as a screen saver.
• It offers several different optimization strategies.
• It can be configured to defragment specific drives, files, or folders, or to exclude defragmenting specific drives, files, or folders.
• You can run it in the background and tell it to run at less than full speed.
• It’s continually developed by a person who you can actually talk to via an online forum.
• There’s no installer — just extract files from a ZIP archive into a directory and run the executable.
• It’s free, as in free beer, and open source.

Hats off to Jeroen Kessels for writing a fine utility and making it available for free. He doesn’t even ask for donations (too bad, because I’d have sent him a few bucks if he did!).

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