Computer guru? help needed, question on files

BoyBrutus

BoyBrutus

I save a snapshots of my charts every 15s for the trading day

As you can imagine my D drive has thousands of picture files.

Problem is all these files seem to slow down my PC (how can the number of files on the harddisk affect pc performance) and when I click on a directory with the picture files it can take like 10 to 30 second to come up in windows explorer

Computer specs Win XP, centrino 2GHz laptop with 1G memory


I did a reinstall recently

1) Is this file problem possible
2) how many files per directory can windows XP handle
3) does adding and deleting files affect the FAT (file allocation table) file?
4) After the number of files build up I burn them to DVD and delete but still performance is affected, I still keep many files on D for reference.
5) should I reformat D


I could not copy all the files to an external USB dive as after while of copying it gives an error, to many files I imagine for a USB external drive.

Any suggestions and help appreciated
 
create sundirectory

looks like
d:\jan
d:\feb
d:\mar
...

then
create subdirectory under d:\jan
look like
d:\jan\01
d:\jan\02
d:\jan\03
...
d:\jan\31

put your file under one directory.

you can run cmd (dos mode) to organize your exsiting files.
 
Over the long term, have a designated server with a database such as Oracle and save your image files as binary data in the database.

Alternatively use a directory structure similar to the one suggested by the previous poster but zip each day's/week's pictures into one .ZIP file and remove the individual .JPGs

With ACDSee you can view JPGs inside a ZIP without unzipping them.
 
a couple of points:

- if you did a reinstall, did you try with just Windows installed? Maybe an application or a driver is slowing down your drive access. Try to see what happens in safe mode.

- I don't know how many files in a directory XP can handle, but the question is rather how many you can handle. With too many files the directory becomes just unreadable. You should split it

- if you create and delete a lot then your drive could be fragmented. I'm not sure if this affects the performance when listing the files, but it does affect the performance. Try to defragment it
 
Quote from BoyBrutus:

how can the number of files on the harddisk affect pc performance
More...

You must use an auto-save feature, so the screenshot software needs to scan all file names in your image directory before saving to a new file name.
 
Hi,

another 'feature' that may slow your system down is the file preview. Windows XP does not only list the file in the Explorer it also reads (partly) the file content. For pictures for example it reads the picture properties like size, color, format,... This slows down the performance if you list many pictures the explorer.
You could use an alternative tool for listing your files.
 
Quote from BoyBrutus:

......

As you can imagine my D drive has thousands of picture files.
....
2) how many files per directory can windows XP handle
3) does adding and deleting files affect the FAT (file allocation table) file?
4) After the number of files build up I burn them to DVD and delete but still performance is affected, I still keep many files on D for reference.
5) should I reformat D
....
More...

First - You mention "FAT" in your item 3. FAT is obsolete and is much less efficient than is NTFS. Are you really using FAT?

To answer your questions-
2) FAT has limits on the number of files and file size. It depends on whether you are using FAT16 or FAT32. NTFS has no practical limits.
3) Absolutely. Adding and deleting files, especially once the disk begins to fill, fragments the files (breaks them into small, non-contiguous pieces) and it takes longer to store and retrieve them from the hard drive.
4) Removing files should help if you defragment. See below.
5) Reformatting normally means reinstalling. It will initially help but is a lot of work. See below.

My suggestions:
First, if your are using FAT change to NTFS. Microsoft provides a utility to do the conversion and it is provided with Windows XP.
Second - Run the Disk Defragment program. It should help to some degree. It will attempt to move the fragments of your files to new locations so that they are contiguous and therefore store and retrieve much more rapidly as the disk heads don't need to jump all over the place.

Go to "Control Panel"
Select "Administrative Tools"
Select "Computer Management"
Select "Disk Defragmenter"

Hope this helps.

Jack
 
Hi everyone

Thankyou for your replies.

I am using Snagit to caputer the screen every 15s and it saves as a .PNG.

jmccain had a good suggestion of zipping each directory and using ACDSEE. I have been using Ifranview as my picture viewer but have ACDsee 7.0 and it has all the features I need as well as beeing able to nicely list a zipped file and scroll through the pictures. I should be able to save the zipped files to an external USB drive as well.

Computer is NTFS, When I referred to FAT I meant some 'master file record' that must get filled up and makes the system very inefficient at some point.

The delay in windows explorer must be from what forexbird mentioned of explorer scanning some file content of picture files. However I notice that the whole system is getting slower which I cannot understand as files are on D: I will do a defrag as suggested and test in safe mode.

ziwuadct I am using such a directory structure.

Thank you all
 
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