Defragging (1 Viewer)

I was always told that scan disc and defragging was a necessary chore and should be done on a regular basis.

With my new CP, which I have had since July, XP keeps telling me it does not have to be done at this time. Do I take it's word for it or will I benefit if I go back to a regular schedule? I might add that I am using less than 10% of the C drive's capacity.

Boy, that was fast Brian. Thanks, I think I will do it upon retiring this evening.

KCFoggin said:

I was always told that scan disc and defragging was a necessary chore and should be done on a regular basis.

With my new CP, which I have had since July, XP keeps telling me it does not have to be done at this time. Do I take it's word for it or will I benefit if I go back to a regular schedule? I might add that I am using less than 10% of the C drive's capacity.

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On a home machine with relatively little use and lots of free disc space, I think all that defrag might do is speed up slightly the access to certain files on the disc - it's certainly not vital for PC functionaing at all, i.e. the PC won't suffer physically from having a fragmented file system, especially when there is so much space on the disc unused. XP automatically preserves the important sytem files, so scandisk is hardly ever needed - and it will tell you if it is.

But you could try running disc clean up, followed by defrag and see if you can detect any difference. I doubt you will. That said, I do run defrag about once a month just out of habit.

LOL Steve, old habits die hard don't they. Okay, it doesn't appear that I need to concern myself with this so that's good to know. Thanks.

I have this vision of my hard disk rather like the drawers in the desk under the PC - and I wish I could defrag those with the click of a mouse, KC, I'll tell you - they're full of this and that to bursting point. That fragmentation might not stress the desk, but my it stresses me when I wnat to find something!

(-:

Off thread, I watched a wonderful American movie last evening, called "Spellbound". The director followed eight young Americans through the annual US "Spelling Bee" competition. It was a very fine film: life-affirming and speaking much (and highly) of the American way of life and "Dream". Don't miss it!

Not really relevant to you at this point KC but XP needs at least 15% free space on a drive/partition do be able to defrag. But its worth keeping in mind if you ever need/want to defrag. A drive that becomes badly defragmented can have a noticable impact on performance.

regards
Gordon

scampo said:

Off thread, I watched a wonderful American movie last evening, called "Spellbound". The director followed eight young Americans through the annual US "Spelling Bee" competition. It was a very fine film: life-affirming and speaking much (and highly) of the American way of life and "Dream". Don't miss it!

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I have not seen this film Steve but I will definitely keep my eyes opened for it.

Gordon said:

Not really relevant to you at this point KC but XP needs at least 15% free space on a drive/partition do be able to defrag. But its worth keeping in mind if you ever need/want to defrag. A drive that becomes badly defragmented can have a noticable impact on performance.

regards
Gordon

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Perhaps I will do it once anyway and then see if my performance is any faster. Thanks Gordon.

KC,

I wouldn't bother defragging with such a small amount of used space on the c drive. It won't make any difference in regard to speed. When a hard drive has quite a few files the computer takes a little longer to read and write to those files. However, with less than 10% usage the read/write time would be very fast.

KCFoggin said:

LOL Steve, old habits die hard don't they. Okay, it doesn't appear that I need to concern myself with this so that's good to know. Thanks.

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Thanks for that Joe. Well it would seem that the consensus is to leave it be which I shall do.

Gordon said:

Not really relevant to you at this point KC but XP needs at least 15% free space on a drive/partition do be able to defrag. But its worth keeping in mind if you ever need/want to defrag. A drive that becomes badly defragmented can have a noticable impact on performance.

regards
Gordon

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Windows (any version) doesn't actually need the 15% free space - you can still proceed regardless - but will be considerably faster with more than 15% (in fact, the more empty space the faster it will be).

If you think of the hard drive like any other storage space, then the more empty space you have the easier it is to find and arrange items.

Windows file management doesn't delete info from your hard drive straight away, it merely tells the OS that the info is free to write over. This is what enables file recovery programs to find accidentally deleted data.
Only when all your hard drive has been written to will Windows (need to) start writing over your old data.

A drive that only has 10% of its space used will not need to be defragged for a very long time, certainly not if it's a modern, large (many Gb's) drive.

It may be worth noting that if you keep material of a sensitive nature, whether it be photos of yourself in the nude :eek!: , company accounts or that invention that you've not yet patented, even if you've cleared the recycle bin, that info could still be there for someone to find.
Defragmenting your drive will help to erase that old info by moving data to previously written parts of the drive but you will need to purchase third-party software if you want to be certain the drive is clean.
If you ever sell on a PC you should make sure ALL info is completely wiped. You never know who might wind up with your bank account details.

If you ever sell on a PC you should make sure ALL info is completely wiped. You never know who might wind up with your bank account details.

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Sound advice. Thanks Esmond.

Esmond, when I last defragged with XP it came up with a dialogue box telling me I needed at least 15% free! And even though I managed to free-up 20% it was very slow and didn't complete the job!!

regards
Gordon