Defrag or not to Defrag?

[panais]

A) Defragment or not to Defragment?
B) Defragment manually or scheduled Defragment?

 

[Jekyll and Hyde]

Personally speaking I defrag manually, if you are a gamer then what I do is install reboot and then defrag, but I do this with other programs to.....and then once I am done I leave it and use my system awhile and then after say 3/4 weeks, sometimes after 2 weeks I defrag again, and so on.

That said though, I have read around the net that unless you use several different programs constantly then defragging should be done more often, and if you use say the same couple of prgrams or so, then its not needed so often

It kind of depends though on how you use your PC I think

Just the way I do things, everyone is different though

Jekyll and Hyde

 

[mansrm81]

I use Auslogic's disk defrag program to defrag my computer every week or 2.

 

[.Joe]

I recommend weekly defrags.

 

[z3r010]

Cant remember the last time I did a defrag

 

[Barman58]

Me neither - I guess Vistas background defrag must be invisible to the user

 

[bruce2]

I installed Diskeeper Pro and it defrags on the background when ever idle resource is available. Status shows thousands of fragments eliminated daily, but sometime it says "healthy" and take a day off.

 

[dmex]

A) Defragment or not to Defragment?
B) Defragment manually or scheduled Defragment?

A) Defrag is automatically done in the background on file read/write access on Vista
B) Defrag is automatically scheduled for a full system defrag once a week

Just forget about having to defrag with Vista because its fully automated

Steven

 

[swarfega]

I think weekly defrags are a bit too much. I defrag once a month unless Ive been doing a lot of file transfers.

I can recommend o&o defrag 11, its much better than the windows vista one and you get to see what its doing.

 

[Bare Foot Kid]

Hello all.

I have mine set to run once a week and I never do it manually!

As dmex says; it's automated now and doesn't need to be run more often!














Later Ted

 

[garysgold]

I haven't done a full defrag since just after I installed Vista (March 08). For the first couple months I would use the properties/tools dialog to start a defrag and it always came back - no need. Just check for the first time in months and recieved the same response. Seems Vista is doing its job so I don't worry about it anymore.
It is scheduled for once a week at install I believe.

Gary

 

[masama]

I almost degrag every other day using auslogics.....

Maybe I am defrag freek....

 

[SgtBaxter]

I think weekly defrags are a bit too much. I defrag once a month unless Ive been doing a lot of file transfers.

Amen.

I don't think people realize that defrag is a serious stress to the hard drive.

Also as drives are becoming larger and larger, defrag is becoming less and less necessary as there is more and more space for the drive to write contiguous files. Really only the people who have smaller drives, or keep their larger drives near the limits of capacity are likely to have fragmentation problems.

 

[Benjamin]

I use Diskeeper Pro 2008 set to defrag all the drives fully automatically when essential. Works perfectly, and I've never had to defrag or schedule a defrag . Usually Diskeeper runs for a few minutes a day to clear up the drives.

 

[coolnewyorker]

Defrag increases used space and decreases free space. When PC says "do not defrag", don't.

 

[swarfega]

er no it doesnt. It just consolidates data.

 

[roy69]

Defrag increases used space and decreases free space. When PC says "do not defrag", don't.

What gives you this idea?
A defrag moves truncated data around the HD to form complete data packets and programs. Defragging the data would speed up the loading process on older systems.

I have not defragged since having vista.

 

[swarfega]

why not?

Its usually a good idea to defrag after a windows install.

 

[coolnewyorker]

Here is one forum discussion on the topic of lost free space after defrag. There are lots of them online.

windows vista general Reduced disk free space after defrag in Vista SP1

I was not aware of it until I read this. And it is true....I did lose free space (from 77 % to 75%) and gain used space after my last defrag (which I did manually out of curiosity). Further reading on the topic indicates Vista's most recent defrag system has the least loss in free space compared to XP, W98 and earlier versions. Apparently, the more intricate earlier versions (when defrag is graphed and progress is illustrated)required more space to function. Hence the seemingly truncated (and disappointing to most of us) "cheaper" Vista no illustration system.

Out of curiosity, I just checked my free space, 1 week post-defrag, and it's higher by 1% (76%) even after having downloaded a tutorial video (video+Quicktime player=1GB total).

Honestly, I dunno how to interpret this space loss and gain in relation to defragging. In summary, I still will defrag but only when my PC says so. (yep, I concede my CPU has tech IQ higher than mine)

 

[Extensa]

I did my first one after 6 months the other day... I don't like how it doesn't show the 'disk status' like on XP. I could at least have some idea of when it needed to be done.

LOL.... Used to have a 30GB hard drive and it took 30 minutes to defrag. Now with 100GB of stuff it took 2 hours Almost makes me sick