"Mark Cherry" wrote in message
...
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)

He's referring to general advice that's intended to speed up your computer.
There's no "speed tips" feature in Windows XP.

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.

Actually, you would be better off spending $50-100 on an uninterruptable
power supply.

Beyond that, while a FAT file system is *very* susceptible to interruptions
during defragmentation, Windows XP allows you to use NTFS which is somewhat
more robust. Corruption is still a possibility, but much less likely.

Of course, the UPS will remove that concern anyway, and should be considered
a *must* if you are at all concerned about data corruption, whether or not
you ever run a defragmentation utility.

[...] 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.

Actually, the CPU will have very little effect on defragmentation times.
However, it is true that the 200Gb hard drive will be faster. Both because
it's likely to be a faster RPM drive, and also because the data density on
the drive is higher (so more data transferred per rotation).

In any case, defragmentation has always been a time-consuming process,
especially as the data on the drive reaches nears full capacity of the drive
in size. It shouldn't be tedious, since once started you can let the
defragmentation utility run on its own. It's not like you have to sit there
and monitor the movement of every single disk sector.

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.

"Perceived" is the right word here. In fact, just because you allow Windows
to manage the swap file, that doesn't mean that it's constantly increasing
and decreasing the swap file's size. That would just be plain dumb, and
whatever you think about Windows, the folks who wrote the virtual memory
subsystem just aren't that dumb.

You can see for yourself. Set the virtual memory settings to allow Windows
to manage the swap file. Run the computer that way for some period of time.
Then boot your favorite defragmentation utility and have it tell you how
many fragments the swap file is in. The number of fragments will be small,
or possibly even just one.

Pete