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Defragmenting Your Drive
So what exactly is disk fragmentation, and what does
Windows' Disk Defragmenter do about it? Here's a nice
description from The Elder Geek: "As advanced as hard
drives have become, one item they are not very good at is
housekeeping, or maybe that should be drive keeping.
When
files are created, deleted, or modified it's almost a
certainty they will become fragmented. Fragmented simply
means the file is not stored in one place in its entirety,
or what computer folks like to call a contiguous location.
Different parts of the file are scattered across the hard
disk in noncontiguous pieces. The more fragmented files
there are on a drive, the more performance and reliability
suffer as the drive heads have to search for all the pieces
in different locations. The Disk Defragmenter Utility is
designed to reorganize noncontiguous files into contiguous
files and optimize their placement on the hard drive for
increased reliability and performance."
If
Defragmenter says that your drive is "only" 4% fragmented
and doesn't need defragging, do it anyway. 4% of 1 gigabyte
is more than you think, and those of us with bigger drives
are that much more fragmented. Never let your drive
get to 10% fragmentation if you can help it. Once a month is
a good rule of thumb; heavy users may want to defrag twice a
month. Expect Defrag to take a good while, especially if
your drive is heavily fragmented. Take your much-neglected
sweetie to dinner, and disable the screen saver before you
go. If it seems to hang, leave it alone for a while -- it is
probably working on a particularly fragmented section of
hard drive and while it seems to have locked, it is actually
busy. (One way to tell is to look at the disk-activity light
on your computer. If there is hard disk activity, the light
will be on, at least intermittently.) Premature shutdown of
Defrag can zap your whole file structure. Hands off for at
least an hour. Go to dinner, come back, and if it's still
hung, then and only then shut it down.
Some
alternative information from PC Magazine: The
frequency with which you defrag your computer depends on the
type of work you do. Programs that create multiple temporary
files (for example, scanning software) require defragging
more frequently. Also, if your disk drive is only 20 percent
full, there isn't much need to defrag except at regular
maintenance intervals. If it's 70 percent full, however,
your system will likely benefit from it.
Ignore
the quick defrag options and pick the slowest, most complete
mode. Some users start Defrag as their last computer task
before bed, letting the beastie wend its way through the
disk during the night. It will be done by the morning.
Win
98/ME users, you have a better Defrag utility than the
16-bit one packed with Win 95. One setting is particularly
useful. When you crank up Defrag, click the Settings button
and make sure that the option labeled "Rearrange program
files so my programs start faster" is selected. This moves
the programs and documents that you use most often to the
faster parts of your hard drive.
Win
XP users have a "boot defrag" option that places boot files
next to each other on the hard drive, thus speeding up
startup. Boot defrag should be enabled by default, but to
make sure, drill down to the Registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
\ SOTWARE \ Microsoft \ Dfrg \ BootOptimizeFunction and look
in the Name column on the right side of the window. Check
that the Data value for Enable is set to Y. If it is, close
Regedit. If not, right-click on Enable and choose Modify.
Change the value to Y, choose OK, and close Regedit.
Win
XP Pro is a bit inconsistent in its automation of Defrag. It
will open the app but apparently won't let you automatically
start the process. Since Defrag is quite schedulable, what's
the problem? The problem is that Task Scheduler has no
connections to Defrag, so you can't use it to schedule
automatic defragging. Defrag can run fine with no graphical
front end at all and that's the key to using it in an
automated fashion. To use Defrag (and other, similar system
tools) this way, you launch the tool via a command line plus
any "switches" you want to use to modify the file's
behavior. Open an empty XP "command window" by clicking
Start, Run, and typing the word COMMAND in the Run line.
Click OK. A command window, usually a mostly black box, will
open. In Notepad, enter one line of plain text: DEFRAG C:
Now, click to Notepad's File/Save As menu. Navigate to your
Desktop in the "Save In" portion of the dialog. In the "Save
As Type" scroll box, scroll down to the "All Files" type
(instead of the default "Text Documents"). Finally, in the
"File Name" area, name your new file DEFRAG C.BAT (or any
similar, obvious name ending in ".BAT"). Then, click Save.
The file should be added to your desktop with a .BAT
extension (instead of a .TXT extension). For example, if you
have other drives or partitions, you can either defrag them
via separate batch files (a "DEFRAG D.BAT" file could
contain just the line DEFRAG D: for example), or you can
enter the lines serially into one batch file. You can make a
batch file called "DEFRAG_ALL.BAT" for example, containing
these lines:
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