Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware (
More info?)
"Peter R. Fletcher" <pfletch(at)fletchers(hyphen)uk.com> wrote in message
news:kmkpn05jvim3ujkvlpbl23sbtn8d5t8us1@4ax.com...
> On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 17:59:05 -0400, Bob Willard
> <BobwBSGS@TrashThis.comcast.net> wrote:
>
>>Peter R. Fletcher wrote:
>>> On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 09:25:30 -0400, Bob Willard
>>> <BobwBSGS@TrashThis.comcast.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>mrbog wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Basides Norton, what's the next best disk diagnosis/defrag app?
>>>>
>>>>Since defragging has little value on most PCs, my definition of best
>>>>is cheapest -- meaning the one included with XP.
>>>
>>>
>>> On what basis do you say that "defragging has little value on most
>>> PCs"? My experience it that it depends on how much free space you have
>>> on the disk partition, but that disk fragmentation can make a
>>> significant difference to Windows performance. On my own system, where
>>> none of the partitions approach half full, the boot partition gets
>>> very fragmented, but I would have to admit that this doesn't seem to
>>> slow things down perceptibly. On my wife's system, which has the same
>>> motherboard, an only slightly slower processor, and a comparable hard
>>> disk, but where, for "historical" reasons, the boot partition only has
>>> 15-20% free space, there is an easily perceptible slowdown
>>> (particularly of program loading) when this partition needs
>>> defragmenting, and a comparable speedup when this has been done. Both
>>> systems have their swap files on separate dedicated partitions, so
>>> this isn't a swap file fragmentation problem.
>>>
>>> Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the
>>> exchange.
>>> Peter R. Fletcher
>>
>>On the half-dozen NT/W2K/XP PCs I've had, I've never noticed any
>>difference
>>in performance resulting from running defrag. On the half-dozen W9x/W3.x
>>PCs I've had, I kinda think I sometimes noticed a difference, but it was
>>marginal at most. Some of those PCs - esp. the W3.x and early W9x ones -
>>included parts, boot and non-boot, that were >75% full {since I did guess
>>wrong about part. growth, and did not juggle the parts or the files until
>>defrag would no longer run}; still, defrag made little or no difference.
>>
>>By contrast, my experience with RCs (you know, Real Computers ;-) running
>>real OSs) showed some substantial-to-enormous gains from defragging.
>>There
>>were many reports from VMS users on the value of defragging -- even from
>>the early years of VMS when its filesystem did not support on-line
>>defragging
>>and so required shutting down the system for a backup/restore cycle to
>>accomplish a defrag. I did a survey a few times of the dozen or more VMS
>>RCs on which I had accounts, and found that the HDs averaged, IIRC, ~85%
>>full.
>
> Hmmm! The only other difference here is that I am running XP Pro and
> my wife is running XP Home. I don't think that is likely to be
> relevant.
>
> Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the
> exchange.
> Peter R. Fletcher
In the February, 2004 issue of PC World magazine, they reported their
evaluation of defragmenters. Here's the pertinent excerpt from their
article...
"When the PC World Test Center set out to determine the effectiveness of the
defrag utilities in our set of suites, plus that of Diskeeper 8 from
Executive Software, our analysts found no evidence that defragmentation
enhanced performance. On a desktop system from the PC World office with a
heavily used, never-defragmented hard drive, the lab conducted speed tests
using a range of applications before and after defragmenting the drive with
each utility. In the end, the Test Center saw no significant performance
improvement after defragmenting with any program. This result flies in the
face of the perceived wisdom that fragmentation hinders performance, though
much older PCs (with slower and smaller hard drives) and heavily used
servers may benefit more from defragging."
I might add that about three years ago, some friends and myself performed
rather extensive tests of a number of third-party defragmenters as well as
the built-in defragmenters in Windows 98 and Windows Me, and to some extent,
in Windows 95. Our objective was to determine which one(s) were most
effective in defragmenting a hard disk in terms of enhancing speed
performance. To our surprise (at least for most of us!) we came to the
conclusion that *none* of the defragmenters resulted in any performance
enhancement. We measured some of the common tasks undertaken by the computer
user, e.g., bootup time, accessing programs, search & replace functions,
manipulating digital images, and the like. The conclusion we drew was
identical to that of PC World, i.e., there was no meaningful performance
enhancement resulting from the use of defragmenters. At the time we
concluded these tests Windows XP was just coming online so we didn't conduct
any extensive tests on that OS, but from some cursory tests we ran using
XP's defragmenting utility, our previous conclusions concerning the
ineffectiveness of the defragmentation process remained unchanged.
Art
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