Optimize and Defrag Drives in Windows 10  

Brink said:

Hello, and welcome to Ten Forums.

Does it show the same using Optimize Drives from option one?

Running optimize drives thru the Tool tab never seems to do anything. In all the years I've had this laptop, I don't think it has ever shown "needs optimization". It always just shows "OK" and days since last run. And when I click in the optimize button I can see it going though % trimming but it literally takes one second to complete. It seems to be a pretty big discrepancy for this method to say everything is ok versus the 65% defragmentation showing in the PowerShell command line method.

Like I said this is my first SSD, I have no experience with what trimming should look like or how long it should take. But I actually have a couple spin platter external hard drives that I defrag once or twice a year, and I know that if they were defragmented at 65% it would probably take a couple hours to run. Granted they are 2TB drives versus only 32GB for the SSD, but I still think cleaning up 65% fragmentation should take more than a second.

I will add that in that same tab there is something named Windows RE tools that says it needs optimization, but when I select that drive and click the optimize button nothing happens.

Brink said:

This unchangeable fragmentation may be from the system and WinRE partitions on the disk that are write protected. These partitions shouldn't be messed with to prevent issues with booting and recovery for Windows.

Most SSDs will have their own built-in TRIM feature in addition to Windows.

Optimize Drives will only look at the Windows "C:" partition, so that would be why the discrepancy since the fragmented system and WinRE partitions are not included.

Since WinRE is write protected, optimizing the listed Windows RE tools drive would most likely have nothing done to it.

Thanks for your insights. I don't have any formal training in computers, what I know I've just learned over the years from having problems and trying to figure out how to fix them. But the "volume is too defragmented to complete this operation" is one I've never encountered until yesterday and it sounds like it might a real problem for me. I've had plenty of problems over the years, most of which I attribute to the severely limited space of a 32GB SSD, but so far I've always been able to fix or work around them. I attempted Reset This PC a couple times over the years, but I never have enough free space to successfully do that. I also haven't done a Windows update in years, again because of the lack of free space, but it hasn't prevented me from continuing to use the laptop.

I barely run any programs and the few that I do are mostly installed on a 64GB memory card (D drive). I learned that I had to "mount" the SD card to trick the programs into thinking that space was part of C drive, the trick works for some programs but not all (and didn't work with Reset This PC or Windows updates). But I've gotten pretty good at working with just 1.5-3GB free space on my C drive at any given time. As far the the trim/defrag, I thought maybe the 200,000+ moveable files and folders listed in the analysis report could be defragged/trimmed (just not the 8 unmovable ones). Seems like that 65% fragmentation number is going to haunt me and may be the end of this laptop.

I learned of this problem yesterday when Microsoft Print to PDF stopped working and I tried to reinstall it. This is the first time I've even seen the volume too defragmented error since I've had this laptop (see screenshot). Now I see it when I try to do almost anything. Google Chrome tried up update in the background at some point yesterday, and couldn't because of same error. I even got the error when I tried copy a very small one page PDF document to the C drive. I'm having trouble opening documents in WPS Writer (similar to Microsoft Word) even though it is installed on the SD card (it did still install some components on C drive, but most are on the mounted D drive ).

I've also had some problems restarting. Twice yesterday the laptop locked up and I had to try a hard restart. But when I pressed the power button to turn it back on nothing happened. In these two cases I was able unplug the main battery, let it sit for 5 min, then plug it back in and it restarted. And the ribbon cable to the power button was fine, I didn't have to re-seat it (I learned about improperly seated ribbon cables in a prior troubleshooting adventure). But this is a pain since the main battery is inside the laptop, so I have to take a bunch out screws out of the bottom and unsnap the entire keyboard section to access the battery.

I did run a bunch of health checks yesterday before I even posted to this forum. Virus and malware scans, the first thing I do anytime I encounter a problem, were fine. Then chkdsk, sfc /scannow, DISM (CheckHealth was ok so I didn't run RestoreHealth, StartComponentCleanup and ResetBase). When I tried to run these checks via Admin command prompt they didn't work, got the volume too defragmented error. I tried them all in Safe mode too, but same problem. However when I went back into normal mode and ran them via Admin Powershell, all the checks completed successfully and didn't identify any problems. Don't know if the means anything.

Brink said:

@radeksgrl,

Go ahead and post a screenshot showing your full drive layout in Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) to see if anything may standout for why the Windows volume is so small.

HP below show your HP Stream 11 Pro Notebook only has a 32GB SSD. That's really not large enough to run Windows 10 with it being bare minimum.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c04551691

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...c-795cf0386715

You can check below to see if it may help to free up some hard drive space.

Free Up Drive Space in Windows 10

After many years of using this laptop, I think I know just about every trick in the book to free up space! I do them regularly and keep an eye on any other things that might crop up with spacesniffer. It's the only way I can maintain 2GB of free space on a consistent basis. And I truly am using the absolute bare minimum of programs:

Google Chrome (C drive)
HP printer (C drive)
WPS Office (D drive)
Malwarebytes (D drive)
VLC Player (D drive)

That's it. I've also uninstalled most of the factory apps that came with the laptop (using Geek uninstaller). A couple years ago I had this thing called TWINUI take over as the default player for all of the factory apps and some others I had download from the Microsoft Store. It made the apps completely unusable and I never figured out how to fix it, so I just uninstalled most of the apps to free up some space on the C drive.

As far as being unable to do Windows updates, I was always ok with it because I assumed later updates would just take up more space. But maybe I'm wrong about that, maybe newer versions of Windows are more efficient in terms of space. My current setup is Edition Windows 10 Home, Version 1607 (Anniversary Update, Aug2016), OS Build 14393.2214, 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor.

Like I said, I didn't know this laptop was going to be so problematic when I bought it. I assumed, incorrectly, that they would sell a laptop with a setup that would allow it to function properly. Honestly, I don't think companies should be allowed to sell laptops running Windows 10 with a 32GB SSD, there should be some sort of law against that! But I am probably their exact target consumer, at the time I just didn't know any better. I don't do gaming or anything intensive like that, so I thought this laptop would be fine, when in reality it can barely handle the basics.

Brink said:

@radeksgrl,

If wanted, you could delete the "Recovery Partition" to become unallocated, and extend the "Windows" partition into the unallocated space to gain another 979 MB for the Windows drive. It's not a lot, but could help make it a bit more functional.

The "Recovery Partition" is for WinRE, so you would have to use a Windows 10 installation USB for WinRE instead.

Been doing some research the past few days. Since I don't have enough space to Reset This PC, I think I might be forced to do a clean install of the OS. Would this fix my 65% defragmentation problem? Since I do have a number of other problems with this laptop, this might fix everything and give me a fresh start.

I don't have enough space to use the Media Creation Tool, but I did find a place to direct download ISO file for Windows, I'm thinking I should do this now while my laptop is still working. It seems like I can try to do the clean OS install with the ISO file, but that I should also make a bootable USB as a backup in case the ISO file doesn't work. Does that sound right to you?

I also read somewhere to download all the drivers from HP website for my laptop, so I've already done that. Is there anything else you recommend that I prepare, that I might need? Are there any critical programs that typically come factory-installed but wouldn't be included in the Windows OS ISO? All of my personal files are already on external hard drives.

I'm also not sure which Windows 10 version ISO I should download. Should I just go with the most recent version? Or is there a version that less buggy than others? Or will the license associated with this laptop want me to use the older version of Windows that came with the laptop originally?