Defragmenting your hard disk

What's the point of defraggin? To increase performance right? Pull out the stopwatch and time things before and after a defrag and you won't notice much of a difference at all, except that you've just exercised the cr@p out of your HD and reduced its lifespan. WIth modern OS-caching, caching drive-controllers and command-queuing optimizations, file- and disk-fragmentation doesn't hurt at all.

What does make a big difference in performance is the registry and its cleanliness or lack thereof. Clean up the registry by pruning out old settings, and compact it. Will increase boot-up times tremendously, be more stable with fewer crashes (one reboot will waste more of your time than any amount of fragmentation).

BTW - fragmentation doesn't get bad until you're +90% full on the HD, so don't fill it up with too much porn! One of the nice features of UNIX/Linux/OSX is that they do defrag on the fly as you read/write files. When you save a file, it doesn't just stick it in the 1st availble free-sector and string things along, it finds a long contiguous spot on the disk first that fits the entire file.

another great performance-enhancing mod is to get lots of RAM, like 1gb+ and turn OFF virtual-memory. Reduce the paging-file to 20mb or less and everything's kept in RAM instead of being swapped back & forth to the disk.
 
Quote from NickBarings:

Where I have to go to do this ?
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You go to START>ACCESSORIES>SYSTEM TOOLS>DISK DEFRAGMENTOR. Then follow the instructions.

PS. Close all your programs before you defrag your hard drive. You should do it at night before you go to sleep, that way when you wake up in the morning, your computer defrag will be finished. It can take 12 hours sometimes to defrag a computer hard drive if you have a big hard drive and you haven't done it in years. My hard drive is 100GB and it takes me only 15 minutes to defrag mine. But I do mine once a month. Maybe your's will be fast too.
 
Some questionable and flat-out wrong information is being posted in this thread but I don't really feel like getting into a back and forth about it. ET isnt the best place to get IT tips, seem like everyone here is an expert about everything.

Anyway on to the point of this post: regardless of the good intentions I would never download and run a program that someone provides a random link to. Stick to maintstream sites/programs. (SysInternals makes great stuff, BTW)

I'm not saying these programs aren't exactly what they purport to be, but with all the malicious individuals out there, frankly it just isnt worth the risk.
 
Is there any software that will delete from the registry, leftover empty folders and sofware bits and pieces that aren't needed that were left over after the program had been uninstalled from the computer. I have tons of obsolete registry keys in my registry from software that was ininstalled years ago. I have registry cleaners but they don't do what I just described. I tried "registry mechanic" and "regcleaner". They compacted the registry that gave me an extra 2GB of hard drive space, but the obsolete keys are still there. I can go in and delete them myself, but there are so many, and I don't want to accidently delete one that is needed by another program to run. Any software suggestions?
 
Quote from GTS:

Some questionable and flat-out wrong information is being posted in this thread but I don't really feel like getting into a back and forth about it. ET isnt the best place to get IT tips, seem like everyone here is an expert about everything.

Anyway on to the point of this post: regardless of the good intentions I would never download and run a program that someone provides a random link to. Stick to maintstream sites/programs. (SysInternals makes great stuff, BTW)

I'm not saying these programs aren't exactly what they purport to be, but with all the malicious individuals out there, frankly it just isnt worth the risk.
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To GTS
You make a good point about using computer related links in general posted here and and quite likely on most forums that are not primarly computer related sites. Here is a site I've liked for some time. Low chance of getting bad links or advice about computers here without someone pointing out the bad info asap.
Link: http://forums.techguy.org/
. agpilot
 
GTS is right about links to sites you know nothing about, and the old ChkDsk is a good advice. It is specially good for detecting bad clusters, and should be used on a regular basis.

Touching to the registry is another story : It's allways risky to change things into it, and before trying a cleanup, you really must first save it ("Start menu", "run", type "Regedit", then use the menu "File... export" and export the whole thing).

If you're using XP, you can also first create a restauration point ("config panel ... Performances ... "Restaurate the system" ... "create a restauration point").

This may help in case you cleaned things to heavy...

Olivier.
 
Quote from SarahG:

Is there any software that will delete from the registry, leftover empty folders and sofware bits and pieces that aren't needed that were left over after the program had been uninstalled from the computer. I have tons of obsolete registry keys in my registry from software that was ininstalled years ago. I have registry cleaners but they don't do what I just described. I tried "registry mechanic" and "regcleaner". They compacted the registry that gave me an extra 2GB of hard drive space, but the obsolete keys are still there. I can go in and delete them myself, but there are so many, and I don't want to accidently delete one that is needed by another program to run. Any software suggestions?
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There are quite a frew. CCleaner is popular. However, I've found that cleaning the registry *always* results in some things being "cleaned" that were not supposed to. Thereafter, I have to reinstall some software because it no longer works properly.

That wouldn't be too bad if it were the biggest problem. Sometimes part of Windows gets fouled. Then you either have to live with the reduced function or reinstall the operating system.

I have stopped using any type of cleaner except as a last resort. I have run System Mechanic as the last thing before reinstalling Windows, and fortunately it usually works... but I'm not surprised when it doesn't.
 
Anyways, not to worry about the links, but if you guys want to check, before running any programs from the downloads suggested by people here, you can run your scanner, or use multiple scanners from this site:

scanner.virus.org
I use this too.
 
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