Found this after completing my earlier post about the Indexing Service.
http://www.theeldergeek.com/indexing_service.htm
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Hope this helps.
Gerry
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Stourport, Worcs, England
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Fragmentation is just one of a number of factors affecting performance. My own observation is that Defragmentation does improve performance but there are other things that can have a more dramatic affect.
It is difficult to comment on the affect if specific files are fragmented, other than on the basis of surmise. I would imagine any fragmented files must impact on performance. The extent would depend on how often the files are accessed and how dependent other services / applications are on the given file. I would guess that fragmented music files may have no impact, unless you choose to play them. Logically fragmented Indexing Service files could have a more generalised affect. However, Disk Defragmenter does not enable the user to say I will defragment that file but not that one. It provides a list of the "Most fragmented files" which gives you the choice of trying to reduce the number of files listed or leaving things as they are.
I have never investigated the Indexing Service. From what little I have read and can recollect it is supposed to facilitate quicker access to files but in doings so it creates another system overhead. Findfast in Microsoft Office was generally recognised to be a hindrance to good performance and best switched off. My Indexing Service is currently not running. Given my interest in performance I feel I should know more about the Indexing Service.
Free space cannot be defragmented with the Windows XP Disk Defragmenter. I believe you can buy other Defragmenters that will perform this task. For me there are other priorities for my funds. Fragmentation of free space is of course one reason why you have a "Most fragmented files" list. The pockets of free space are individually not large enough for the fragments to consolidate. Running Disk Defragmenter a second or third time does move files around and can reduce / eliminate the contents of the "Most fragmented files" list. The more free space on the drive / partition, the more likely it is that all fragments will be eliminated. Pagefile.sys is another file you cannot defragment. For this reason mine is in it's own partition .
--
~~~~~~
Hope this helps.
Gerry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FCA
Stourport, Worcs, England
Enquire, plan and execute.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please tell the newsgroup how any
suggested solution worked for you.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~