In ,
wrote:

On 21-Sep-2003, "Mark Cherry" wrote:

Quick questions for you all,


How many of you take the time and trouble to defragment before a
major install
like FS?

Have you ever tried deactivating virtual memory, defragging, then
re-enabling
virtual memory? (To un-frag the swapfile, in effect)

Ever had any problems specifying a fixed-size swapfile, to stop it
from becoming
fragmented?

Speed Tips/Speed up software are the new Snake Oil industry.

Speed Tips? Is this what its called in XP? (I'm still in '98 land until next
week)

Defragging has become one of those things that conventional wisdom
says is good.
I would challenge that notion and point to the number of times
defragging has actually caused file corruption. Why this is not dealt
with by the text books is beyond me!

One thing that I've never seen mentioned and would like to see *strongly*
emphasized is that, if you live in an area where power cuts are commonplace,
then you would be better off not defragging at all. A once-a-month defrag is
often more than sufficient but if you've come to expect at least one power cut
per month then sod's law dictates that it will happen in the middle of a defrag.
Like as not at the split second where it's completed a read and hasn't finished
the next write!

I saw a news clip, after the NE USA blackout, where someone from the boondocks
said it was no big thing for them because they get blackouts all the time.
That's the sort of thing I'm on about.

Of course a badly defragged system should be dealt with but , if
fragmentation is slight , I wouldn't bother. Hard drives are
amazingly fast and accurate at picking up data , so speed
improvements are rarely noticed.

Again, I think it's because I've been plodding along at 400Mhz for so long that
it's become second nature. The new system I'm getting will have a 200Gb drive in
it which, as you say, will be inherently faster. The defrag exercise itself
could be a tedious and time consuming business, relative to the 8Gb unit I have
at the moment but the CPU will be nearly 8 times faster, so I suppose it'll
balance out and take as long as I'm used to.

Don't worry about the swapfile. Again Fixed size or System Managed
it's had to spot a benefit. Some experts say one thing and others
another.

The perceived advantage is that, if the swapfile is kept at a constant size, the
same disk sectors get used for it all the time. Files either side of it can come
and go and defragging leaves it in position. When Windows manages it, it changes
size all the time and that sometimes means that, when it needs to expand, bits
of it are written into the gaps left by files which have been deleted. So the
swapfile fragments and that means it takes fractionally longer to do what it has
to do because the data is no longer contiguous on the disk. Then again, it will
only be during times of large demands on memory that this will noticeably affect
performance. Like as not, this will be while running multiple applications - say
you're running a word processor, spreadsheet or database, downloading something
from the internet and dealing with mail or newsgroups while you wait, not while
you're running FS, where the tendency is to shut down unrequired tasks first.

I would leave FS9 as system managed on the basis that it's a Microsoft
Product and will have been developed with default settings in mind.

Good point.

Thanks for replying.

--�
regards,

Mark