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Does XP need to be defraged?

Yes, it does need manually defragging from time to time, although XP also seems to do it in the background when the drives are idle too.
 
No, you do not need to defrag. Most I/O access is random so whether files are sequential or not matters very little.
 
Originally posted by: KoolDrew
No, you do not need to defrag. Most I/O access is random so whether files are sequential or not matters very little.
Click to expand...



I wouldn't totally agree with that. While light to moderate fragmentation's not a problem, heavy fragmentation degrades performance. Applications seem to open faster, and the system seems peppier after defragging a heavily fragmented drive. It's a little sluggish on reboot after defragging, but then it smooths out an runs better.

I defrag mine once every few months, or when I see a lot of red in XPs drive analysis.
 
Does XP need to be defraged?

No, it needs to be fraged 😛

Ofcourse you need to defrag everynow and then, however check one of the billions of threads about this topic and you will get an answer for sure 😉
 
Originally posted by: KoolDrew
No, you do not need to defrag. Most I/O access is random so whether files are sequential or not matters very little.
Click to expand...

I/O access is logical if programmed correctly. Why do you say it is random?
 
Today, with contig (and /s recursive switch), I just defragmented some crucial parts of my system (%SYSTEMROOT%\*, %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\*, %USERPROIFLE\Application Data\*) and notice quite a difference in loading times of things. The start menu loads in about 250msec instead of 2000msec. Opera incurs some huge improvements from just defragmenting its cache file. Something like defragmenting your huge downloads collection is what I'd call useless though. It's worth the 15 minutes it takes to defrag the 3 above system-esque directories.
 
Originally posted by: KoolDrew
I never said fragmentation will never degrade performance. In extreme cases it will.
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How do you define extreme? What percentage of fragmentation according to XP's built in utility?
 
I/O access is logical if programmed correctly. Why do you say it is random?
Click to expand...

Because many processes are requesting I/O and there's no way you can predit where on disk the data will be. But even if your 1 app has perfectly timed I/O requests, they're still going to interleaved with the I/O requests of any other process on the system. The OS should do it's best to merge unrelated, but physically close requests so that seeking is lessened but it still has to make sure that every process doesn't get starved waiting for I/O. And unless you're attempting to read some very large files, a few extra ms caused by seeks here and there aren't going to be noticable.
 
How do you define extreme? What percentage of fragmentation according to XP's built in utility?
Click to expand...

And what does that percentage actually mean? Is it the percentage of fragmented files? Is it the percentage of blocks that's are used, but aren't contiguous with the owning file? Does it include fragmented free space?
 
Oh man, you guys are the greatest! Thanks!

I ran that CCleaner and it took out over a gig of stuff! I hope I didn't do any damage.

Under Startup, I took a out a few obvious things. I wanna stripped down system at startup, for online gaming and program performance and such. Are any of these remainders important?

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b334/excipio/CCpic.jpg


EDIT: don't know why the img is so small, photobucket is 512k limit...
 
Can anyone tell me what is important to keep in Startup?
I erased the obvious stuff, but I'm left with 7 entries:

CFTMON.EXE
ehTray
NVMixerTray
NvCplDaemon
nwiz
NvMediaCenter
SSBkgUpdate

There is also Zone Labs Client, but I think that's my firewall, so I'll leave it. Can I blitz the rest with no weirdness happening to my PC?

Thank you for your help!
 
Originally posted by: TheNiceGuy
Can anyone tell me what is important to keep in Startup?
I erased the obvious stuff, but I'm left with 7 entries:

CFTMON.EXE
ehTray
NVMixerTray
NvCplDaemon
nwiz
NvMediaCenter
SSBkgUpdate

There is also Zone Labs Client, but I think that's my firewall, so I'll leave it. Can I blitz the rest with no weirdness happening to my PC?

Thank you for your help!
Click to expand...

Most of those looked like they'r erelated to Nvidia hardware. Just google the process and you'll find out for sure though.
 
Crap Cleaner is EXCELLENT. I've been using it for over a year.
Also, download TweakXP. That really sped up the boot and shut down times of my computer.
Overall it seems a lot happier (faster) as well, but that's probably just my imagination.
 
And back to the title question. Maybe.

My C: drive stays pretty much defragged. I use it as a program and OS store. Usually the 'fragmentation' goes away when I delete IE cache. Funny how that happens 😉

My E: and F: drives are different stories. I use those for video store and render store. They can get fragmented quickly. After I remove projects, I do a defrag to clean them up, but they usually are 'better' once the files are gone (my projects usually involve at least 150GB of video). I store other stuff on them, but other editors keep the drives clear of other stuff and do 'format' at project end.
 
 
I had an exchange server so heavily fragmented that it stopped responding to all requests, and was bad enough you couldn't terminal into it. Had to go to the console and defrag before it was all fixed.
 
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