I'd like to add my 2c worth to this string about defragging, and it's this:

Defragging is overrated.

Before anyone rushes in to claw me to to bits, my experience has been that defragging produces neglible results in increased speed and efficiency, and in most cases the improvement is so slight as to be undetectible by the average person.

And because I've serviced many, badly fragmented drives on old machines, which were otherwise running and performing perfectly normally, I also conclude that hard drives seem to be able to endure the added physical wear and tear which is (THEORETICALLY) caused by fragmentation, without significant reductions in their life span, although I guess it could be argued that older drives may be more robust.

The defragmentation is, of course, achieved by re-shuffling the data on the hard drive, which is a bit like tidying up a room by completely rearranging it's contents.  (But did the sofa go back in EXACTLY the same place?)

Years back, the last thing I'd do after tuning a customer's machine was to add a folder to their desktop containing shortcuts to ScanDisk, Defrag, RegClean, RegCleaner and Frank Langa's Cleanup batch file, and I'd tell them to run the lot once a week.

But then I began to notice that other machines I'd run across were running perfectly well, and stably, without any of these added refinements, and some were so badly fragmented that almost every cluster had elbow room.

Plus, some of my finely, and 'constantly-tuned-by-owner' machines were inexplicably crashing.

So I stopped bothering with the Langa Cleanup.  Then I abandoned installing RegCleaner.  RegClean followed.

Now, I don't even suggest to my customers that they defrag.  If I service a machine, I'll defrag it before I add any major software packages, like Office say, and once again before I finalise the job.

So, there's my take on defragging -3c worth maybe.  You'll have to make up your own mind :--))

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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On 19 Sep 2003, at 6:04, Ann Sensabaugh wrote:

> I read from asktcl.com that once per month you should Scandisk & Defrag. When I go to Defrag it says "which drive do I want to defrag, Drive C or Drive D........do I defrag both of them or only one? Thank you for you help.
>

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