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Norton's defragramenter vs. default Win 2000 and Win 98 defragramenters

R

readysetgo

Member
Hi

I am considering buying Norton Systemworks 2001 over Norton AntiVirus 2001 because systemworks comes with Symantecs defragramenter. But before making the purchase, I wish to know how the defragramenter in question (the one included in Norton Systemworks) compares to the default Window 2000 and Windows 98 defragramenters.

All help and suggestions are higly appreciated. CHEERS!
 
I have used both Norton Utilities 4.0 and Norton Utilities 2002, and for win98 i really like the Norton's 4.0 defrag.
Running win2k right now, and Norton's 2002 defrag seems ok, but i think MS's defrag is ok too, both defrag about the same way and at the same pace. If anyone knows what Nortons does differently than win defrag, I too would be interested in knowing the difference.
Hope this helped at least a little...
alcopro
 
My warm thanks. Your reply has helped, as well as other replies I've garnered at Tom's community forums. I still very much welcome more comments and free knowledge 🙂


CHEERS!
 
i fear degrag like the plague.. I've killed 2 hard drives, and my friend one hard drive with defrag... my computer will be running fine for months, I would run defrag (the only time i ever ran it on the hdd) and it would go for hours then lock up hard, forced to hit reset.. then when it boots it fails and the hard drive starting clicking the click of death, and i never recovered data from either one.
 
Win98's defragger is horribly slow. There is an easy fix if you have access to a WinME machine though. Just snag the defrag.exe from it and copy it over the one in Win98. It is MUCH faster. I've been using it (frequently) on my Win98 for over a year with no problems.
 
Valhalla1, your tale is quite incredible. They are one to be shared with IT professionals to give them nightmares. Unfortunately, I have to say that it's must likely that you've just having, quite frankly, the most horrible of luck. I hope things get better 🙂


Gonad the Barbarian, yo! Thanks for the tip buddy. It's great to know that. I have heard though that Symantec is the one that provided Microsoft with the defragrmenter that comes with Win98, quite an early version of it I'd suppose. I feel confident with going with the one provided with Systemworks. Once again thaks!



Have a great weekend everyone and CHEERS!
 
well things are perfect now - I just dont run defrag! 🙂 actually i have run it on my u160 10k scsi XP OS drive, but I keep the degrag away from my IDE data storage drive (the important data)
 
OT post

I have a friend who doesn't defrag because "it flogged the hard drive too much." His solution was to reformat and reinstall. I tried to point out that formatting and resinstalling does "flog" the hard drive too, but his brain couldn't seem to wrap around that concept.
 
Norton's defrag is pretty good, definitely better than microsoft's (which is really bad). Systemworks is a pretty good package and has some pretty useful utilities, the main ones being the AV and defrag, just beware of some of the others like cleansweep and crashguard (or whatever it's called). They are dangerous and IMO should not be installed...

Another good defrag program is Diskeeper, in case you're interested...
 
Lots of people(including me) have had problems with Norton Systemworks. I'm talking unexplained freezes, crashes, reboots. Bad stuff. It seems to screw with your system a lot. My advice is to stay away from Systemworks. I have just the Antivirus and I've had no problems with it.
 
Defragging a drive is a great stress test. My old 45 GB 75GXP first started acting up during a defrag (clicking, cat scratching). Ran DFT and haven't defragged since and it's still alive.
 
I defrag every day (yes I'm a defragging zealot) without any problems at all. Because I do it each day, each run takes about 3-5 minutes on my 40GB drive. Your system will run a lot faster with a defragged hard drive, and if it only takes 3 minutes a day then it's worth the effort. BTW, I'm using Diskeeper 7.0 on my WinXP machine to do the defragging and I gotta say that Diskeeper is easily the best defragger I've tried. It's fast, you can run it while you're using the computer without it restarting, and the built-in scheduler is very nice.
 
readysetgo,

you don't say what OS you're on but for any NT-based system O&O Defrag is a lot better than Norton.

Diskeeper is fine too, I used that before O&O but now I really like O&O.
 


<< I defrag every day (yes I'm a defragging zealot) without any problems at all. Because I do it each day, each run takes about 3-5 minutes on my 40GB drive. Your system will run a lot faster with a defragged hard drive, >>



No. A drive with normal fragmentation, less than 10% doesn't get any speed boost by have ~0-1% fragmentation after a defrag, because it was mostly slack space it was messing with anyway as all the applications and OS files were already locked in position. You're really just putting wear on your drive. But suit yourself, in most cases you're not going to do enough to harm it.
 
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