Under Windows 2000 I've been trying to use the OS's defrag tool to tidy up a hard drive. During the past few days I've tried about 3 times and slowly but surely, my disk (or at least, my files) are becoming less fragmented.

I'm not a great believer in defragging because to be honest, despite the lofty claims made for defragging I've never found it makes any appreciable difference to my system's performance. Having said that, with every other defragger I've used, the ultimate objective seemed to be to get all the free space into a single contiguous block at the end of the disk - even if the files below it were left slightly fragmented. AFAICT though, Windows' own defragger has no such objective. At the end of each operation my free space seems to be left highly fragmented. To me, this seems to be missing the whole point of defragging. Can anyone suggest a better defrag tool? Preferably one that's free!.