On 5 Mar 99, at 11:20, Jack Granowski wrote:

> Nothing earthshatering, but I have seen recommendations for years,
> that always state to defrag regularly, from 2 weeks to every month.
> Whenever I do w95a says that it is not needed, as it is only 2% to 4%
> off.  I normally download a fair amount of files and delete about the
> same megs, eventually. I defrag anyway but how often should it be
> done?  Should I listen to the infinite wisdom of 95?

  There are sort of two pieces to fragmentation, and when Win 9x gives
you that low-ball number, it's only looking at one of them.
  On the one hand, there is fragmentation of existing files.  In order
to become fragmented, an unfragmented file needs to be appended to,
sufficiently to require one or more additional clusters.  This is a
common scenario for documents or databases or logs, but relatively rare
for other kinds of files.  So it makes sense that most users would
encounter this only on a small scale, and this is where the 2% to 4%
number comes in.
  On the other hand, the free space on the drive can itself become
fragmented.  This is kind of insidious, because it can cause new files
to be *created* already fragmented.  Win9x won't count this
fragmentation of the free space until it is used for a file.
Constantly creating (downloading) and deleting files is likely to
produce this effect.

  Defragmenting a drive is a performance tune-up.  If you're not seeing
much slow-down from files being fragmented, you probably won't see much
improvement from defragging.  Every 2 weeks is probably more than often
enough for most people.

> I also scan fairly often, and errors are always found.  I try to
> keep my disk as clean as possible and get rid as much junk as I can.
> Are regular errors on scan normal?

  Scandisk seems to decide that my boot sector needs re-writing every
other time it runs, so I've come to consider that normal.
  But in general, errors found by Scandisk tend to indicate either (a)
an incorrect system shutdown, or (b) a failing hard drive or controller.
If you can tell us the exact message, that could help narrow it down to
one or the other.


David G

             PCSOFT maintains many useful files for download
              on our web site - visit our download page at:
                     http://nospin.com/pc/files.html