defrag drive C?

LReavis wrote on 3/7/2009, 11:20 AM

I've read that it is a waste of time to defrag disks, but after seeing my system get stuck often during boot, slow opening of programs, and occasional crashes, I used Windows defrag on Drive C. However, it still showed many fragmented files.

So I used some long power leads and a long SATA cable to hook up my boot disk to another computer so that it wouldn't have any open files that would foil the defrag process. THAT really did defrag my disk. After several days, I have not had any mysterious boot problems or crashes and programs definitely open faster.

If you also have maybe 100 programs installed and have used the same Windows installation for a long time (I've used this one for about 18 months) and have uninstalled and re-installed lots of stuff (Vegas 7, various DVDarchitect, media players, DIVX converters, etc. etc.), you might want to do the same.

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Chienworks wrote on 3/16/2009, 6:34 PM

If all you ever do is copy files from one place to another, one file at a time, you might notice a *slight* difference between a defragged drive and one with the files fragmented "thousands" of times. In normal use, you'd probably need a stopwatch to detect any difference. Other aspects such as other programs running, various processes kicking in, amount of free RAM and pagefile swapping, will make a much much bigger difference than any gain you'd get from defragging, to the point where such differences completely swamp file access speed issues.