Henry writes:

<<browsing the Web leaves all sorts of
junk all over one's hard drive, would using one of these things
to clean it up, followed by a defragmenter, help performance
and/or stability of the system?>>

You are correct---internet browsing will fragment your hard drive more than
just about anything.  If you are an avid browser, you should defrag at
least weekly. One of my techie friends does it daily (he's on cable).

A badly fragmented hard drive will slow performance, though that won't be
noticeable unless it gets beyond a certain stage, depending on your system.

Which now brings me to a question of my own which I've often pondered.  My
browser cache is on the same partition as Windows (XP). Logic tells me that
this is going to fragment that partition, to the detriment of the operating
system.

Is it advisable to move the browser cache to another partition---perhaps a
small partition of its own? There, it can fragment away to its heart's
content without messing up my squeaky-clean new XP installation. IE6 does
give the option  for that possibility.

Would it be even better to reinstall IE6 to the same partition as the
cache, or would that mess up its integration with XP, ----IE6 being so
tightly integrated with XP?  (I'm not sure whether IE can be installed
separately from the XP disk, or whether it can be easily uninstalled---I
suspect not, or maybe that exercise might end up more trouble than it's worth).

I'd like to keep as much stuff as possible off the partition where XP sits.
Dunno quite why, it just seems to me a good idea. Maybe with modern fast
computers with oodles of RAM it doesn't matter much.

What do the experts think?

Don Penlington




 From the beach at Surfers Paradise.
http://www.geocities.com/donaldpen/
for sunny Queensland photos, fractal art, free computer tutorials, and more.

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