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 . . .

→ Read More: A free replacement for the Windows defragment utility