So lets say your hard drive is like my desk – cluttered as (…insert witty remark here…)
Everything is scrambled and spread out. That invoice is not next to the check nor the clients file. But wouldn’t it be helpful if we did that? Would it save time? This is the same general principal behind defragmenting. Yes we have covered this before and we will cover it again.
When you defragment a drive you move commonly accessed files to the front and lesser used stuff away. You move similar types of data to the same place on the drive to limit hard drive movement. This increases your overall hard drive speed by keeping seeking to a minimum. Keeping a defragged drive will prolong drive life as well. If you arr heavily downloading ahem stuff from the Internet and then deleting it chances are your drive is fragmented up – windows recommends defragging @ 3 percent. Whats that how do you check? You right click on my computer and choose manage or open your computer management mmc. Then choose disk defragmenter – highlight your drive and choose analyze.
MicroSoft then lets you know what’s up. I try to defrag regularly and have it scripted on my servers. If you delete huge chunks of data its time to defrag, if your machine is sluggish its time to defrag if you got hundreds of gigz of crap on your machine and you dont know what i’m talking about – then its REALLY time to derag. This is one of things that is scanned by using Microsoft’s one care… Strictly the free version guys. Never say you want to buy… It will clean your shit honest and the paid program is a resource hog and Ive seen it f up more than one machine. Hollar @ me how do you defrag – and do you defrag? We also covered scripting defragmenting here…
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One of my professors in school recommends running the Windows Defrag in safe mode. He said it works more efficiently that way. has anyone else heard that?
Bauer-Power
I didn’t even this i could run it in safe mode. Will it run?? Time for some testing. Evil Cackle
pablo – I don’t see why that would be true. The whole point of safe mode is that all your drivers aren’t loaded, in case one of them is crashing your system.
Having fewer drivers loaded and a few extra services not running shouldn’t make defragging any more or less efficient.
This is what we did in windows 98 – because any changes would cause the scan to restart.
Nowadays you can run the defragger in the background and continue to work (albeit slowly)
@Evil Cackle did you try it out? I would love to hear your findings?
@ElDiPablo – have you used safe mode defrag on XP before?
Running it in safemode is indeed faster, as per my anecdotal evidence from having done it.
Reason being….is that there is less overhead on the system in terms of services, applications and drivers. So more processing cycles are available to handle the requests as they come through as opposed to having to wait.
Have I tried it? Heck no. Running it while Windows is running is good enough for me. I was just wondering if anyone else had heard what my teacher had said.
Bauer-Power
Whether you have to or not would depend on how fragmented the drive gets. Its like a disease which affects different drives differently depending on usage patterns, those who add and delete lots of files need to do it very often like daily or weekly, some others do it monthly etc. When you run the utility, it IS best to run it in safe mode since there might be programs running in the background that may interfere and cause it to restart, hang etc.
With a good automatic defragmenter, running in safe mode is not required; only with manual defraggers do you have to worry about such things. Besides, automatic defraggers can be set once and left alone, with zero user intervention from that point onward. The defraggers manages the entire defrag process on it’s own, silently and efficiently.
senor presidente – what does your royal self use to automate defragmenting?