Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg
It sounds like the other fellow just hasn't filled up his hard drive to the point that it matters. That could be bad because if the disk gets too full, defragging becomes quite an adventure.
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That's Eternal Truth, Greg. I still remember (and shudder at the memory) the time that I worked on a client's 5 year old computer that had
never been defragged. Not even with Windows' defrag. End result? 98.75% fragmentation; 9 hours, 45 minutes total defragmentation time using PerfectDisk 7 (the then-current PerfectDisk) after I did significant junk-file cleansing and eliminated
53 extra copies of AOL (ranging in version from 3.0 up to 9.0, with 27 copies of AOL 5.5) had to have helped drive space considerably. I then did an offline defrag (actually, a boot-time defrag) that neatened the system files and the system was significantly faster.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg
He also might be playing a game that doesn't do a lot of disk access or have large files to fetch during game play.
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Perhaps, or maybe he's just ignorant as a stump. Even more frightening? The nice folks at
Maximum PC magazine have decreed that "Drive defragmentation makes little to no difference in speed, and can degrade load times." The article actually recommended "If you need a defragmenter at all, use a freeware one. It'll be better than Vista's. It won't help you, but it won't hurt, either."
Let me tell you, as a computer consultant who has seen first-hand what defragmenting a HDD can do for performance (see my first response in this post), their testing was pure
hogwash. Their test methodology was sound (they fragmented a drive, then made a proper 1:1 image of said data, using that for each test) but their results are, at best, suspect. (See this month's issue for the test.)
To see an otherwise good magazine pump out bilge wash that bad really gets me a bit steamed. Fragmentation of critical system files or areas (the pagefile or MFT for example) can torpedo your performance, especially in Vista, so it's more than a good idea to lock the paging file to a size 2.5x the size of your system RAM (or 4Gb, whichever's smaller) and make sure it's moved to a place that makes it fast. Since most (if not all) commercialware defragmentation programs have fully-functional trialware, use one of those (I recommend PerfectDisk 2008) in "Offline Defrag" (despite the name, it defrags prior to XP or Vista coming all the way up, during the so-called pre-boot mode) to get the system files into shape.