Computers are getting faster and hard drives are too, but then again the size of the hard drives is also getting bigger. If you have a really large hard drive with files spread out all over then it will surely take longer for the computer to move the head on the hard drive to the correct location on the disk.

I’ve rarely deferagmented a drive, and speaking as one who (as you may have noticed) is rather into computers I don’t think this is that great a feature. For a start with the size of drives these days a defragment could take a whole hour to complete, which isn’t what you want hogging your processor on boot. Secondly I’ve never actually seen a performance benefit from a defragment. Maybe on a slow machine with not enough memory (anything less than 1GB) it would be a problem, but not on a decent specced PC. I may try a standard XP defrag at some point and see if I notice a difference, but I shan’t hold my breath.

This would be a good way to schedule defrags for all the drives…

Thanks OldManDeath for the PC World article. That is what I will invest in.

No problem, that is why I participate here. That and because it is an awesome website and resource.

How do you know that the defrag is taking place?

If you schedule the defragmentation then you will not really know when it is running because it runs in the background. However, it would probably be apparent that it is running when your hard drive light never goes off.

I know not everyone is going to do as many file changes as me but I think it is good to take care of a problem before it would even occur. If I set this up for other people they never even know that it runs since I schedule it for the middle of the night, but in the long run it will help them.

BTW, I don’t know if you folks faced it, but I had a blank password for the username, and it kept throwing up a Access Denied error.

In properties tab, I had to check the Only Run when logged on and it accepted.

That could effect performance if you are using a large file such as a large ISO image which means it would have to spread the file out over multiple free space sectors.

I think that is the one big difference that I have heard between the two besides for the fact that Diskeeper does the background defragmentation.

Here is an article from PC World on the subject of wiping sensitive data.

Something else related to defragging I meant to ask. I get issued a new notebook PC about every 2 years via a Dell lease program at my workplace. After receiving my new PC, I transfer the data, srub out all of My Docs, cookies, etc from my old PC and then ship it back.

I read somewhere that if I truly want to clean out those deleted files (some may be personal), I should defrag after deleting the files & Deleted Files Folder. Am I on the right track?

I am not sure that this would really do anything for you as there is no data to move.

What you would really want to do is get a good wiping program and wipe the free area of the drive. I believe Norton’s utility was called WipeInfo. There are numerous ones out there. You just want to make sure that you only wipe the free space.

I like this auto-defrag feature. Thanks for the update.

Doesn’t defragmenting itself seem like a Windows band-aide? I wonder if Apple PCs require this. Maybe my head is in the clouds here, but why can’t the operating system just organize the hard drive right the first time?

Windows XP is a huge leap over Windows 9x in the area of betoer organization on the hard drive. XP does not get nearly as defragmented as Windows 9x versions. I do not know if there is any improvement in this area with Vista, especially now that the WinFS files system is dead.

I read somewhere that if I truly want to clean out those deleted files (some may be personal), I should defrag after deleting the files & Deleted Files Folder. Am I on the right track?

Doesn’t defragmenting itself seem like a Windows band-aide? I wonder if Apple PCs require this. Maybe my head is in the clouds here, but why can’t the operating system just organize the hard drive right the first time?

I use Diskeeper and have never set it up to automatically defrag. I usually will run it in the morning and leave for work.

When I get home for lunch, it has all 3 disks defragmented.

I am curious to what options, if any were added to the Vista version. Windows built in defrag was always good at basic defragging, but lacked advanced features that I like.