Hi Pop, I think you are right, about it being a personal opinion.. but
everyone who has responded has pretty much agreed.. thanks Rainy
Rainy said:
I appreciate your response, but that is your opinion that
defragging every
day is totally unnecessary... I believe that it helps my
computer.. I know
of other techs who also defrag every day.. and when I do
maintenance which
includes defragging, I feel/see a noticeable difference .. so I
keep doing
it.. I am on my computer a great deal, and have a maintenance
plan... which
works for me..
I used to have windows xp PRO.. unfortunately it wasn't a valid
OS..
( a
tech put my computer together and I had no way of knowing
whether it was
legitimate of not until windows validation came out) so when I
was able I
purchased a new OS.. and got Windows XP HOME.. which is
slightly different..
so some of what I am setting up is new to me, for instance, I
was never
asked about the MFT when I was running XP Pro.. and this is the
reason I am
having a few problems not the fair share you speak about..
since I am asking
about my friends computer and my sons.. My computer is running
in top
form.. That is why I mess with it.. I want it to stay that
way!... thanks
Rainy
Defragging your hard drive **every day** is totally
unnecessary. You seem
to have more than your fair share of problems. Why do you keep
messing with
your computer ??
MD
I pretty much agree with Ken's response that once a month is
probably a good figure.
I used Norton's System Doctor for a few months to monitor
drive fagmentation on my own machine and the empirical results,
for -me- turned out to be that once a month was usually plenty,
but if I was into heavy use with MS Office creating and killing
all its temp files, etc., then maybe as often as two weeks.
Firing up any of myu video editting stuff (not the MovieMaker
freegie) pretty much dictated a daily degrag if I spend many
hours actually editing video.
The -only- time I ever noticed defrag helping noticeably was
after a day or so of heavy video editing, a very disk-intensive
app, which creates many huge files over and over, deleting and
creating scratch files et al constantly. I also found that doing
a defrag before I did any video rendering could cut hours from
the rendering times too. But, like I said, that's me. Not you.
Then of course there is the question of how much fragmentation is
too much? Ten percent? Fifteen percent? It also depend on
whether you are accessing the fragmented files on the disk. If
not, no problem. If so, maybe you can notice it; it depends on
how many fragments any particular file may have.
For myself, I found I was often feeling like I felt the
fragmentation effects at about fifteen % on the system drive and
almost never on the other data drives, unless I was doing video
work, as already mentioned.
There are really only two instances where I can say I honestly
notice fragmentation: Video work, or installing/deleting a lot
of programs/files.
On the flip side, I don't know that there is anything wrong with
defragging once a week, but I'd have to agree it's probably
overkill. Unless you're the type that sits and watches the
defrag operation working: Then, the more often you do it, the
less time it'll take to defrag. I let my automated defrag run
once a month overnight while the machine is idle. I'll
occasionally run additional defrags, depending on what I've been
doing and how the machine feels, but ... I'm just playing it
safe. I let a drive reach 78% fragmentation once (mistake, not
on purpose), and had to run it three times to get a complete
defrag. Norton's Speed Disk wouldn't even touch it, though the
drive had 40%+ free space. I had to use XP's defrag to do it, so
used it all three times.
So, IMO It's a presonal preference, but I pretty much have to
agree with Ken that once a week is overkill. At the same time I
don't know that it's going to hurt anything either though at once
a week.
Pop
