How Often Do You Defrag?

[1bloke1dog1mr2]

Now I hate Pcs, I'm definitely a Mac girl , but my Hubby has one so what I want to know is... how often do you defragment the hard drives?

Some say once a week (which is what we do) some say it's a waste of time. What d'ya reckon?

[Fizz]

Whenever i can remember to do so.

I have 4 drives in the comp of verious sizes and genreally the larger disk drives have loads of crap on them like films/mp3/pics etc and can get a bit messy.

Your best bet is to just analyse the disk and see how the dirve is... if there is a lot of blue blocks then your usually alright... if you see red lines all over the place then you deffo need a defrag.

Your comp should advise you if you need one when it has finished analysing the disk drive.

Hope that helps... :)

[jay dh]

i dont do it as often as i should. i do it about once a month. (i think vista has an auto defrag function)

it depends on how much stuff you install and remove, if its very little eg a couple of files now and then, one a month should be ok. if day in day out your updating files and removing things, once every week or two is better.

defrag is one of those things that you dont really notice it speeding the computer up, but if u never did it, your computer would gradually get slower

[MarcTS]

I never do it and I shift around a lot of data on my hdd every day (a few hundred files totalling maybe 6-7GB) and that includes saves, moves and deletes.

I don't know if they improved the file management system in XP over Win 2k but my XP install doesn't get above 20% fragmented. And as I normally nuke windows and reinstall it about once every 2-3months, I just don't see the point.

[Fizz]

Well i would rather set off the defrag than 'nuking' it every 2/3 months..

[MarcTS]

Well I don't nuke it because the hdd is fragmented. That would just be silly. I tend ot install a lot of programs to test things out and eventually the sheer number of programs tends to slow the whole system down and it all gets a bit flakey. So the easiest way to clean up the system is a quick format and reinstall. That way I end up with only the programs I absolutely need (for a few days anyway), a clean registry and a defragged hard drive.

I should really do a clean install and then ghost it immediately to a dvdr. That would mean I could do a base system install in about 15 minutes when I want to clean the system out next time.

[Fizz]

i was about to suggest the ghost option but going by your obvious knowledge i though that would be teaching you to suck eggs?

Why dont you use it as an option? (not tried it myself but know the theory)

[Kev Mc]

I don't do it nearly as often as I should, it gets done once or twice a year, if that. I'll try to remember to do it soon because I haven't defragged it since I got it towards the end of last year

[MarcTS]

i was about to suggest the ghost option but going by your obvious knowledge i though that would be teaching you to suck eggs?

Why dont you use it as an option? (not tried it myself but know the theory)

It's always on my list of post installation "thing's to do" and I always install Ghost and then get distracted and by the time I remember again, my system is completely junked up, so it's not worth doing.

On top of that I had a run of bad luck a few years back when about 1 in 3 ghosts I performed ended up corrupted and this was only found out half way through an image restore and it happily reported that it was unable to restore the image to the hard drive and it was now going to trash all the data that had survived up to that point. I'm sure the newer versions are a lot more robust, but I'm a man who can hold a grudge!

[Fizz]

...but I'm a man who can hold a grudge!

I work in IT as well and that comment is true of most of us!

[Karma Supra]

Every few days... I run adaware, virus scan, disk clean up and defrag the disks..... Just to keep things tidy!

[Andie_M]

as often as i remember to! and im gonna wipe the laptop out sometime this month, as it'll be a year old and theres some amount of guff on it i jst dont use anymore!!!

[Yaris SR Kid]

Norton - Speed disk

All the way!!

[mr_miller]

the new version of disk keeper defrags on idle CPU cycles, so its constantly keeping your hdd tidy.

If you leave the machine on all the time, create a scheduled task to defrag the machine. Create a batch file, with this as the command defrag.exe C: /v >C:\defrag\defragc.txt, save it in a folder called C:\defrag or similar. Then just schedule the execution of this batch file

[Ryan1985]

Some say once a week (which is what we do) some say it's a waste of time. What d'ya reckon?

It's a complete waste of time if you ask me. I've not done it in over a year!

[Robie]

I just buy a new hard drive and the other still works fine when Iwant stuff off it :D

[Jamesb4uk]

Defrags always a good idea - if your constantly moving files around & deleting stuff it really does help.

I hate windows defrag though - always resets itself, i use O&O Defrag Professional. on my home PC's & O&O Defrag Server Edition on all my servers that get shipped out to clients.

J