Basic hard-drive maintenance for Windows

[DoctorDoom]

Have you defragged your hard drive lately? A badly-fragmented drive can slow a box down to a crawl. To do that, open My Computer, right-click the C: drive and select Properties > Tools. The attachment shows what appears (if you use the default XP Playskool theme, the appearance will differ ;) ).

Best bet is to run the error check first. This will most likely require a reboot. After it's finished, run the defrag. If it hasn't been done in a while, you'll have time to plug in a movie or go out for dinner, but once it's done, the drive will perform more quickly.

Note that XP's built-in defrag is SLO-O-OW. There are commercial defraggers that are much faster. I've used VoptXP (http://www.vopt.com/VoptXP.htm) for several years. This is what a not-too-badly fragmented drive looks like, from the website:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v349/DocDoom777/VoptXP.gif

They can be a lot worse. All the red squares are parts of fragmented files. The drive has to load them by assembling the parts from all over the drive, and that takes time. This is what it looks like when it's done, from a screen grab on this box.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v349/DocDoom777/VoptXP1.png

If your drive is getting full (80% or more), there may be very little contiguous free space for large files, and Windows is forced to fragment them to fit them on the drive. Defragging will make open space for the big files.

Puter Maintenance 101 is dismissed. ;)

[Franko]

Not that I'm real knowledgeable on the subject, but I had read in the past year that defrags are not as important with newer hard drives as they used to be. Still good to leave free space on yer hard drive though. 80% rule is a good one, never fill a hd more than that. With the size of drives these days, it shouldn't be a problem.

[DoctorDoom]

The issue of free space is less important than the effect of fragmentation on performance. Every little red square is a part of a file. If several dozens of them are pieces of one file, the hard drive has to go all over the drive to fetch and assemble them into a single file. Since HD seek time is the worst speed bottleneck in a computer, this will seriously impact performance.

The sheer size of modern drives, and the efficiency of the NTFS, make defragging less critical, but it's still sound computing practice.

[Marcster]

Doom -- Another product to consider over VOPTXP is Diskeeper. The "Home" Edition is $29.95.
http://www.diskeeper.com

[DoctorDoom]

I have purchased versions of Diskeeper and PerfectDisk. They didn't impress me particularly, but it's a Ford-Chevy thing.

[Wyatt_Junker]

Defraggin now. Its slower'n dirt.

On laptop instead.

[DoctorDoom]

Two uncited factors:

1. By default the page file (aka the swap file) is located on C: and it eats up the empty space, especially on low-RAM machines. Random low-memory errors can sometimes be attributed to that.

2. The default space allotted to system restore files is 12%. On a large drive that add up to schitteload of gigabytes.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v349/DocDoom777/CompTech/SystRest.jpg

The slider controls the space that can be eaten by restore files. 12% will keep files many months old, and restoring to one of them could wipe out a lot of changes. 1 GB is adequate for more points than will ever be used, and if space is tight, 300 will suffice. Reducing the percentage will delete older points as necessary, and can free up gigs of HD real estate.

Adventurous geeks just turn SR off and reinstall if a situation arises that requires it. That's not a Good Idea for the average user.

[Rhino]

PageDefrag will also defrag the page file and registry, which most defraggers won't do. It was originally developed by SysInternals.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/FileAndDisk/PageDefrag.mspx

[DoctorDoom]

Never heard of that one. It might be useful. However, if the page file is dynamically sized, it will become fragmented again in short order. It would be worth setting it to a fixed size prior to running the program. Note: this isn't for the timid.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v349/DocDoom777/CompTech/SetPage1.jpg

1. First run the regular defragger to optimize the free space.

2. Right-click My Computer and select Properties (or use the Windows logo key plus Pause/Break) to open System Properties.

3. Click Advanced and then Settings under Performance. That opens Performance Options.

4. Under Virtual Memory, click Change.

5. By default, the page file is on the C: drive. Click it to highlight it as shown in the graphic (H: in my case, one of the seven partitions on the two built-in drives).

6. Select Custom size: (absolutely NOT No paging file), and enter the same value in Initial size (MB): and Maximum size (MB):. Typically the values are 2-3 times the amount of RAM.

7. Click Set. If Windows will gives a dire warning, ignore it. OK it. You'll be told that the computer must be rebooted for the change to take effect. Be sure that everything is right (no errors in the numbers, mostly), and then reboot.

8. When it fires up again, your page file will be of a fixed size. Now run the PageDefrag, and the file will be assigned to a continuous block of drive clusters, and will never be fragmented again.

9. It would be best to defrag again to fill up all the holes left the PageDrfrag.

[PrezLeefun]

Thanks for the tip Doc.