Do you defragment your hard drive? (1 Viewer)

[SoCal]

Do you defragment your hard drive, and if so how often? I just do it whenever I remember, which is about once a year.

 

[velox]

used to do it once every few days, cos i did so much installing/uninstalling, but now i do it every month or so. But it takes a while - 240gb storage on hdd's

 

[SoCal]

I have only used up about 15 GB of my 80 GB hard drive.

 

[velox]

yeah i did a big cleanup, but now with broadband, it fills up much quicker.

 

[SoCal]

yeah i did a big cleanup, but now with broadband, it fills up much quicker.

Yeah, I bet it has.

 

[velox]

not with pron Just with movies...Actually its more like programs...but my computer is very legal.

 

[Kazuya]

Not on a regular basis. Usually when it starts getting a bit clunky/laggy. But i never use winxp defrag, I hate that, always gotta use some 3rd party prog.

 

[SoCal]

Not on a regular basis. Usually when it starts getting a bit clunky/laggy. But i never use winxp defrag, I hate that, always gotta use some 3rd party prog.

I just use the Windows XP one.

 

[melsc]

i am lazy and 4get...shld do it

 

[r0wlzii]

Microsoft reccomends a Defrag every month and a reformat every 6 months.

 

[SoCal]

I have never reformatted this computer and I have had it for about a year and a half. I would consider doing it if I had a DVD burner to copy everything to.

 

[tomorrows_angel]

never reformatted... and i defrag every couple of months when i can be bothered to stop myself using the comp for the couple of hours it takes.

 

[MedNez]

Defrag every few months, never reformatted this machine. Formatted my old one twice.

 

[NightWolf]

ok a crash course on fragmentation ;
framentation is the splitting of a large area of free memory into smaller non-contiguous blocks. This happens after many blocks have been allocated and freed. For example, if there is 3 kilobytes of free space and two 1k blocks are allocated and then the first one at the lowest address is freed, then there will be 2k of free space split between the two 1k blocks. The maximum size block that could then be allocated would be 1k, even though there was 2k free. The solution is to compact the free space by moving the allocated blocks to one end and the free space to the other
As modern file systems are used and files are deleted and created, the total free space becomes split into smaller non-contiguous blocks (composed of clusters or sectors or some other unit of allocation). Eventually new files being created, and old files being extended, cannot be stored each in a single contiguous block but become scattered across the file system. This degrades performance as multiple seek operations are required to access a single fragmented file.

u should defrag ure hdd bout once a month, u should also reformat every 8 months or so maybe every year, its good to start clean 4 a new year.

I would also look for temp files and old files every 2-3 months
u should also clean and defrag ure registry the same time u defrag ure HDD

also about once every 2 months u should clean out ure prefetch folder \WINDOWS\Prefetch

a good idea is also to write a .bat file that will delete ure temp folder on every shutdown, u can make it run on shutdown by going into RUN and type gpedit.msc


4 me space wise i have a 80gb hdd with 70gbs of stuff on it, i have about 15gbs of music on my hdd player, and i have 27gbs used on my 60gb hdd, and i have crap burnt to about 300+cds so thats about 160gbs

 

[SoCal]

I would also look for temp files and old files every 2-3 months
u should also clean and defrag ure registry the same time u defrag ure HDD

By temp files, do you mean "temporary Internet files"? Also, how would I go about defragmenting the registry?

also about once every 2 months u should clean out ure prefetch folder \WINDOWS\Prefetch

So, what, do you just delete everything in the folder manually?

 

[NightWolf]

By temp files, do you mean "temporary Internet files"? Also, how would I go about defragmenting the registry?

To clean ure registry i use Advanced System Optimizer (ASO) by systweak, and also win registry cleaner, also ASO has a old junk file cleaner to save u doing in manually.

In prefetch you would want to prudy much del everything, so in answer to ure qu yes.
but u dont want to do this too often, if prefetch is to full it can slow system down, however if u delete it to often, say every shutdown it will also slow ure comp down
for deleting temp

First go into gpedit.msc

Next select -> Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Terminal Services/Temporary Folder

Then right click "Do Not Delete Temp Folder Upon Exit"

Go to properties and hit disable.

Now next time Windows puts a temp file in that folder it will automatically delete it when its done
u will also want to make a bat file that will delete temp in ure user name

 

[dangerousdave]

I got this program that everytime my computer enters screensaver it automatically starts defragging and when i exit screensaver it stops defragging.
Works great, it's called Executive Software Diskeeper

 

[SoCal]

To clean ure registry i use Advanced System Optimizer (ASO) by systweak, and also win registry cleaner, also ASO has a old junk file cleaner to save u doing in manually.

In prefetch you would want to prudy much del everything, so in answer to ure qu yes.
but u dont want to do this too often, if prefetch is to full it can slow system down, however if u delete it to often, say every shutdown it will also slow ure comp down
for deleting temp

First go into gpedit.msc

Next select -> Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Terminal Services/Temporary Folder

Then right click "Do Not Delete Temp Folder Upon Exit"

Go to properties and hit disable.

Now next time Windows puts a temp file in that folder it will automatically delete it when its done
u will also want to make a bat file that will delete temp in ure user name

Thanks for your help but I don't really understand what you are saying. I don't even know what the registry really is. So I think I will just leave it until something goes wrong.

 

[NightWolf]

just delete everything in the prefetch folder
and get a program called Advanced system optimizer it will do it all 4 u

 

[SoCal]

just delete everything in the prefetch folder
and get a program called Advanced system optimizer it will do it all 4 u

OK, that I can understand. I will get that program if it is free and not too big. Thanks.