Disk Defrag making my laptop LOSE memory- Help Please!?

Question

I just did a disk defrag on my Gateway laptop and went from 92.4GB free memory to 86.7GB immediately follow the defrag. What's going on here? I thought that I woud gain free memory rather than lose it. It did the same thing a few weeks back when I did a defrag, so I did a System Restore and was able to get (that time I lost more like 10GB) the memory back that way.

My laptop is a Gateway M-6834 with Vista Home Premium. The defrag that I used was the one that was pre-installed on the computer (windows). 

I'm curious as to why this is happening, if I should get rid of the windows defrag and get a 3rd party one, or if for some reason this is normal. The computer itself is like 2 or 3 years old, runs fine, but I was just trying to "clean house" and gain some performance.  The last time that I did a disk defrag was in 2008 (I can't remember if it was doing the same thing then and that's why I disabled the scheduled defrag in the first place).

Any help, advice is appreciated...

Thanks

Gatcho · Accepted Answer

like what the other guy has mentioned ... defrag has nothing to do with disc space. it won't increase nor decrease the amount of space that you have. it will only "re-arrange" your files so that they can be accessed faster.

if you're losing space in your hard drive ... then you have a different kind of problem. it could a malware in your computer. or your virtual memory / swap file is set to automatic and it's using up a good amount of hard drive space.

odette · Answer

Uninstall programs that you dont need, burn music, movies pics etc onto DVDs ets, run a diskcleanup(get rid of temp files, recycle bin files, older restore points) and you should be able to get some space free. You can also get an external drive and move some stuff off to it. If that doesnt work, check out some third party tools which may complete the task with much lesser free space. HDD space is the storehouse of data, where all your files, programs etc are stored. RAM is memory which is required to run the programs that you have installed.

Anonymous · Answer

Clean up the drive, probably a lot of temporary files taking up space.

steindor · Answer

defragmentation has nothing to do with disk space.
it rearranges your files on the hard drive, it does not magically make your hard drive bigger.

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Disk Defrag making my laptop LOSE memory- Help Please!?

4 Answers