When I read this several months ago I knew there was something off with those statistics but I just couldn't see what it was. I thought to myself, "a 40% increase??? That?s the equivalent of moving up from a 2.0ghz to a 3.0ghz. That?s an insane jump in performance."
The truth is that?s an inflated statistic. Nobody's computer has a 100% file fragmentation. I?ve never formatted my machine and I can go right click on my c drive go to tools and analyze the hard drive for fragments and it says still after all this time, you don't need to defragment.
I still say defrag is only neccessary when your computer is over a certain age or when your hard drive is starting to wear out. If your hardware is older and it runs less efficently you'd be in the position in which you would need to squeeze every little bit of preformance out of it you could. When you hard drive is going out, sectors will become unusable and scandisk will block them off. Then you need to reorganize the data on the disk to be retrieved in the most efficent manner. Other then these there is not much you can do besides peroidically cleaning your machine free of malware and registry errors thats going to end up increasing your speed 40%.
If - all - the files were fragmented then an overall 40% increase in read time over - all - files would produce a 40% increase, but you can see that there is a separate measure for the read time on all files. You won't see too much change in this except during the initial use of Diskeeper 10 Pro, thereafter, as Diskeeper 10 Pro maintains the files in an unfragmented state, you will just see that the - overall - read time remains the same.
If it takes an application 10 seconds to open before Diskeeper and only 1 second to open after using Diskeeper, that represents a tenfold increase in speed or operability even if the rated hardware speeds stay the same, which they do.
Take a good look at the flash demo.
Similarly there are increases to be had when it comes to startup and shutdown.
My start up time (from pressing the start button to the instant when the desktop wallpaper appears) on a 10GB boot volume, is 67 seconds and shutdown is 10 seconds.
So, after cleaning all the junk files off the drive...
Day one...
1. Check the Master File Tables to see if they require enlarging and follow the recommendations given.
2. Run a boot-time defrag on all volumes setting directories at the front of the drive(s) and checking to run CheckDisk (chkdsk) and defragment the master file table(s) and paging file(s).
3. Set the program on 'Set It And Forget It' with the CPU priority turned up to High and elect to have Diskeeper do a comprehensive defragmentation with free-space consolidation and also elect to 'Efficiently defragment large files in 'Defragmentation Methods' in the 'Set It And Forget It', Primary and Secondary Defragmentation Job Properties.
Day two...
Run through the above procedures again to confirm that all is as it should be, and if it is 'forget' about it for a month or two, or until such time as you perceive there to be a slowdown.
It should now continue to defragment your entire drive automatically.
One less chore to do.
Cleaning out old registry keys and removing malware are separate maintenance items which should be carried out regularly.
Like most others I use SpyBot SD, AdAware SE, SpywareBlaster, CCLeaner and EmpTemp to remove Trojans, junk files and old registry keys and I also pick through the registry by hand every so often.
ERUNT/NTREGOPT is used to make registry backups and to compress the registry hives for a faster startup and the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service, from Microsoft, is used to ensure a clean shutdown.
NONE of the drive volumes use compression, as that slows processing down, and the Compress Old Files registry key has been completely removed for the same reason.
Result of todays automatic defragmentation showing a 43% increase in read time on fragmented files...
Most of the other files on the drive (94%) have remained at zero fragmentation over the 24 hr period.
Have fun!