Schedule a defrag in Windows XP

In Windows XP, you can defrag a volume easily by right-clicking on a drive in My Computer, choose Properties, and then click on the Defragment Now button on the Tools tab.

Pretty easy, but what if you wanted to do this on a weekly or monthly basis? If you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten some weeks and can’t remember which drives you defragged, etc.

If you want to setup a schedule to defrag your computer, you can easily to do it in Windows XP yourself. In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps.

Step 1: First go to the Control Panel and open Scheduled Tasks.

Step 2: Now click Add Scheduled Task and click Next on the Scheduled Task Wizard screen.

Step 3: Now you need to choose an application to run for the scheduled task. In our case, we want to run the defrag program. The defrag.exe file is stored in the %systemroot%/System32 folder in Windows.

This folder is usually located at c:\windows\system32. Click Browse, navigate to that folder and select defrag.exe.

Step 4: Now choose a schedule for your task, i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, etc and click Next. You’ll then be able to specify the exact days of the week or month that you want the defrag to run.

Step 5: Click Next and then enter the username and password for the Administrator account on the computer.

Step 6: Click Next and then make sure to check the Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish box.

Step 7: Click Finish and then a dialog will pop up with all the options for the task. You can edit the schedule or any other settings in this dialog.

Before we finish, we need to actually configure which drive/volume that we want to defrag. You can do that by adding the volume letter after the command in the Run box.

For example, if you want to defrag the C drive, you would add C: to the end of the command as shown below:

That’s it! Enter the administrator password and your task will be updated! You can also add a –f parameter after the volume letter, which will force a defragmentation of the volume whether it needs it or not.

And that’s about it. Now you can schedule a defrag on as many drives as you like for whenever you like! Also, be sure to check out my post on how to schedule a batch file to run in XP. Enjoy!