does anyone know of a program that i can boot from and defragment NTFS drives while they are off line, so you can hit the registry and critical operating system files and the paging file too?

the tool for linux is under beta testing so i'm kinda iffy about using that, and its the only one that will run on linux and defragment windows partitions, so i was hoping there might be something a little more mature in development

I am failing to see the problem.

You boot a PE of some kind or from a second OS instance and defragment all you want on the offline system volumes.

Without the above:

Registry can be defragmented (meaning the internal Registry filesystem) normally:

http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/

Pagefile and system files can be defragged with pagedefrag:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb897426.aspx

using boot-time defragmenting.

Particular cases can be solved using Contig:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinte...s/bb897428.aspx

or Wincontig:

http://wincontig.mdtzone.it/en/

Most defrag utilities will have boot-time defragmentation too.

Ultradefrag comes to mind:

http://ultradefrag.sourceforge.net/

jaclaz