Is this good advice? I did some of the things and I’m not sure if things are better or not.
I’m especially curious about the following two pieces of advice:
RUN SCANDISK (unless you have Windows XP). “ScanDisk” can be found by going back to the “System Tools” folder. It checks your hard drive for problems. Make sure the “Automatically Fix Errors” box is checked and do a “Thorough” scan. Don’t plan on using your computer for quite a while. It typically takes many hours.
RUN DISK DEFRAGMENTER. This is also found in the “System Tools” folder. It consolidates the files on your hard drive, making things run smoother. I start this when I’m ready to go to bed. It takes all night.
I think you’d still want to use scandisk if your drive is set to FAT32 or sixteen (even if your running XP). Back when I wasn’t using NTFS I scandisked and defregged all the time. I thought it was “fun”.
Like in the old defrag it was fun watching the computer move files from one part of the disk to the other. Defrag just brings hard drive puzzle pieces together so your computer runs faster (or something like that).
Seconded. Scandisk and Defrag are both useful, although scandisk irritates the shit out of me. Defragging does what MK just said - when files are saved to disk - any files, program, media, document, whatever - they get split up and chucked in different parts of the drive to fill gaps left by deleting stuff. Since the drive head has to dart all across the physical hard drive to find all the bits, it can slow down your computer (particularly opening the files affected). Defragging just takes the files and sorts them out so all the pieces fit together nicely and all the chunks are reconstructed into single files, so the computer can find all the bits in one go.
EDIT: And I just read the article. All good advice. Booting into safe mode for an adware and virus check might be going a little overboard, but it’s still sound advice.
before you run defrag you should open all the programms you usuaslly start and than get your harddisk defraged. otherwhise you wont get any benefit[/quote]
Wrong. If you open those programs the odds are good they’ll access the drive in question and defragging won’t be possible.
Prior to XP (I think) most iterations of Windows’ defrags had a seperate option to deliberately defrag in a manner that would prioritize your most commonly used applications, but now it’s done by default - Windows keeps track of how often you use each program, and works by that.
Every single article I found about defragging (for XP or older) says that it helps speed up the system for the exact reasons Tetsuo and I just laid out. I’m almost certain you’re NOT suppose to run software while defragging or scan disking (you definitely don’t for one of the 2, maybe it was scan disk). I didn’t see anything that recommended leaving programs open to help optimize the system (and can’t think of a reason why it would).
One thing a friend back home did is make a small partition that he installed windows and the programs he used most on. That partition was closer to the middle of the drive and that was suppose to speed things up (or something).
I think you have much to benefit from running defrag, programs open or not (it’s not like it costs extra money).
Actually I can think of a reason it wouldn’t. In order to defrag the files being used by the program, it would have to load each entire file into memory and switch to running it from there in order to be able to move the file, which could conceivably cause your system to take a big performance hit while doing that, and I can’t see any logical reason it would make a difference to where the defragged file was relocated to.
Defragging and system checks are good things, but I use Norton System Works to do the jobs. After close to a decade of using their software (and/or software made by companies Norton later bought), I’m a very strong Norton supporter. Never did trust the built in MS programs for these tasks, but if it works for you, then go for it.
Actually you should have as few programs as possible running when defragging. Any program that is open and any files it has open will be locked and cannot be defragged. In fact for best results you are supposed to boot to safe mode to defrag so that most of the OS and all the dozen or so programs in your system tray won’t be running.
Are harddiscs nowadays that fast so they can read adjacent sectors in one go?
I do remember that “in the good ol’ days” defragmentation did not put the fractions together as one file, but instead sorted and linked the parts into the sectors that are read one after another (e.g. 1, 4, 7, …).
Or was that a actually a limitation of the processing, ie. harddiscs were too fast for the bus/processor?