Disk Fragmenter

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Jan 16, 2007 | 12:15 AM

Patatoe1

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From: South suburb of Chicago

Disk Fragmenter

Can someone explain to me what the Disk Fragmenter option (in the control panel) does? What are the postive and negative effects of using this option?

Thanks

Jan 16, 2007 | 12:20 AM

Mil1ion

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Joined: Jan 2008

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You should do it every month at least ....if you do a lot of computing.

It is basically a "cleanup and reorganize the room" type thing.

When I defragment I first get rid of all the cookie/temp files (cache dump)

do the defrag

then do a complete scan all the discs for problems.

Jan 16, 2007 | 01:14 AM

donjamer

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From: MA

Quote:

Originally Posted by Patatoe1

Can someone explain to me what the Disk Fragmenter option (in the control panel) does? What are the postive and negative effects of using this option?

Thanks

The disk defragmenter is used to realign the files on the hard drive to make it faster to find and load them. When files are written to the disk it depends on where the heads are located when writing. This causes pieces of data to be placed at various spots.
When you save a file to disk you would think the complete file is in the same place, but it isn't.

The defragment process was need more in earlier versions of Windows as they didn't allocate space as efficiently.
Windows XP handles the allocation of space better, but it is still good to defrag every so often.

Defrag should be done, especially after removing a large amount of files.
Most of the time windows XP will tell you it does not have to be deframented.

Positives would be that the disc doesn't have to work as hard so it will probably last longer (No guarantee).. Also increased speed when loading programs (Probably not noticeable).

Negatives - None