I noticed my computer was slowing down so I went through all the usual maintenance (junk files, spyware, defrag, etc…) Various utilities and the little windows properties panel indicated that I 36 gigs of free space and 111 gigs used. But when the defragger that came with System Mechanic Pro analyzed and “graphed” the fragmentation, the free space seemed closer to 7% of the total. I think I’ve been hearing a low “whirr” sound coming from the computer but I don’t see the light of the drive blinking. Which do you think is giving me a more accurate assessment of my drive space? Any comments/recommendations appreciated.
I’m taking a SWAG here, but I believe the 36 free/147 total represents the maximum amount of data you could cram onto the hard drive, whereas the 7% (~10 gigs) represents the free ‘clusters’, i.e., *readily accessible space. That said, I’d say you have about 10 gigs (the 7%) of usable space left, as if you cram too much onto a hard drive, it seems to slow down. Another point: have you cleaned your registry? You may have programs starting up when you boot your computer, crap like Realplayer update etc., in the \windows\currentversion\run tree of the registry.
Looks like I’ll have to start deleting. I keep the programs running at an absolute minimum. I have virtually everything disabled in System Mechanic’s Start Up Manager. Disabling won’t slow it down significantly more than deleting the entry will it? I ran a registry scan and it found 122 invalid entries, but nothing I could clearly say was superfluous.
Also, isn’t it a bit odd to have 20-odd gigs not accessible? That seems like an awful lot. Does having 10 “accessible” gigs the number to use when assessing how often my computer is accessing fragmented virtual memory?
Dude; You need dual Hard Drives.
Get a small 40 GIG 7200 RPM or faster, if you can do the $, to use as a “C” drive and run your OS and most used applications on.
Use your monster Zillion GIG as a “D” drive and store all the MP3’s, JPG’s, GIF’s, DOC’s, AVI’s, MEPG’s and other ‘stuff’ on the “D” drive and let the applications go get what it needs off “D” when it needs it.
It had been my experience that most any drive starts getting slow when over 60% full. Seem silly to me but none the less… I get up to 60% and I add a drive and or store stuff I no longer use …
YMMV
Dual hard drives can be useful in more ways as well. I typically keep all programs on my primary drive, and set my pagefile to the secondary drive. That way, no one drive is doing all the work.
I haven’t really noticed any performance hits when my drives get near-full though, and I don’t really see why that would necessarily happen, but maybe my experience is the odd one.