General Chat

With modern high speed high capacity discs, unless you are in the habit of adding and deleting large numbers of files on a regular basis, regular defragging is often unnecessary.

At the time when defragging was invented, hard disc mechanics were much less sophisticated and much slower. Today's hard drives are hundreds of times faster than those from 20 years ago, so fragmentation makes much less of an impact on read-write performance. A badly fragmented drive today would still be faster than an unfragmented drive from ten years ago.

The speed difference you will get from defragging a modern drive is probably going to be imperceptible unless the drive is more than 50% fragmented. So before running defrag run an analysis first to check.

Running a disk and browser cleanup is likely to be far more productive. A free program such as CCleaner allows you to clean several areas in one hit (i.e. temp files, cookies, history, recycle bin, etc) and, importantly, allows you to whitelist cookies for your favourite sites so you don't have to worry about your pc forgetting passwords or site preferences. It also has other useful tools such as a registry cleaner, startup manager and program uninstaller.

If you pc has been around for a while, check what is running on start-up. It is surprising how many unecessary programs manage to install themselves over a period of time, all of which slow your pc down. Apart from your security program and windows related processes many others can be disabled or even removed completely.

Most are obvious, such as programs which check whether or not a non-critical product has a newer version every single time you start your pc.

If in doubt, just disable.

dont forget that with disc cleanup, ..... make sure you remember your logins, because removing cookies means you will have to re-enter passwords or logins/ on the sites you visit.....

I could do with a defrag - I'd also very much like to be digitally remastered :-D

Phyll


you should also do Disc CleanUp


that gets rid of Temporary Files that result from every internet action that you ......... as well as getting rid of any files you have put into the Recycle Bin when you deleted something.


Doing Disc Cleanup regularly is a good idea .............. I used to do it every evening, and it only took 3 or 4 minutes at the most. I've got lazier, and only do it about once a week, and it still takes less than 5 minutes


Defrag will take longer, but should be done every few months.


I used to liken Defrag to what happened to the filing when I was working

................. I'd take a file out of the drawer, but be in too much of a hurry to put it back in the right place.

After this happening several times, it would take time to find files because they were all out of order.

Then I would have to spend an hour or so re-doing the filing.




sylvia

Thanks Bob, NOW I understand a lot better.

Ronald, I'm a she.

Phyll

Makes good sense to me Bob. Phyl might also try deleting Temporary Internet Files which could clear some space on his PC

Phyll, Defrag....ment

this function occurs ONLY on the disc drive on your computer,it only moves stuff and doesn't delete anything.....


Think of the files being like the pages in a book......with an index, Ideally the pages will follow the index but it happens that pages get misplaced, so that instead of following a sequence(say a story) in order, so instead of it following page one, two three ect it is having to go say page 20, 35. 70,2 ,5 to get pieces of it........


defrag collects all these misplaced pieces and replaces them in the correct pages.....theoretically making the sequence faster, and making empty space on your disc so that a new file can be placed there.............

trusting that ive not confused you,

Bob

Thank you Kay. Feel better about doing defrag now.
Phyll

No Phyll your tree will be safe.

I think I understand what this means but if I do it will I lose stuff off of my trees. Sorry to be so ignorant. Certainly don't know much about computers and it's obvious.
Thank you
Phyll