Topic: to defrag or not to defrag?

[basserho]

i have never defragged before, i am wondering what it does and is it worth it.....ive had my pc for abut 1 1/2 years now, should i do it, and if so, how long will it take, i have a 60gb hard drive

[Sandra]

There was some debate about this on another thread.It appears to be beneficial on all OSs although microsoft said it wasnt necessary for later systems from 2K on.Adept mentioned that it is still better to do it on all OSs.
It tidies stuff up deletes unused/damaged stuff and speeds your pc up.
I should think that 60 gig and 1.5 years may take quite a few hours.I would leave it doing it overnight if I was you, close down all other programs and exit or pause any that are running in your taskbar as these can make it start over again as it can change the file informaation  

[Adept]

To simplify things a bit basserho, when Windows writes a file to your hard drive it doesn't neccessarily write it in one continuous area, it usually put bits and pieces of the file in different areas of the drive.

What defragmentation does is bring all those bits together on the drive. This means that the file can be read more quickly because the disk head has to move about less.

NTFS partitions are supposed to be less prone to fragmentation than FAT and FAT32 partitions, but I've never seen any evidence of this.

[Clive]

Don't forget to disable your screensaver too, because every time that kicks in it will go back to the beginning of the process.

[Hitch]

Its pointless, you will be lucky to see an improvment in anything and if you run a decent amount of programs then after a few days it willbe back to square one.

There is still a percentage of older net users that were around when the old "defrag or die" scares started circulating and they still pass this info on to newer users unkowingly telling them porkies.

Dont bother even if you have 3.1, if you have anything even resembling 98 or above then turn any auto options off for this.

[Clive]

Dont bother even if you have 3.1,

Personally I have never seen the point of upgrading from 3.0.    Seriously though, I've heard that there is not much point in defrag too.  However I just can't stand the thought of having an untidy HDD so I defrag every few months or so.  You know what they say, untidy HDD - untidy mind.    :heehee:

[bat69]

I'm a bit more extreme, I tend to reformat my HD and reinstall everything I want. I do this at anything between 6 and 12months. Yes it is extreme, but it gets rid of a lot of guff that gets put in strange places on your system.

Often this is prompted by a crash or something, but I like to have a good clear out.

In order to make this a little less tiresome, I have a partition purely for programs and OS, all my data is in other partitions and I don't reformat that. I do do a defrag tho, and this is usually at the same time once I have the OS up and running again.

This approach makes it more important to backup everything you download regularly. I keep all security updates etc on CD for future use.

[Tony]

Well I'm like you Clive,

I like a tidy HDD, I just anyalised it and this is the result: C Drive 30GB - 22.5GB Free Space

 Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found 24 fragmented files and/or directories and 68 excess fragments. time taken to analyze drive 4 seconds



D Drive 10GB - 8.95GB Free Space

Diskeeper has completed analysis of this volume and found 0 fragmented files and/or directories and 0 excess fragments. time taken to analyze drive 1 second

Like I have said before my defrag set up does it automaticaly as and when required.

Who's a tidy boy then and the wife says I never clean up, well really !!!