What is “defragmenting” (or “defrag”)? Why should I do it? How do I do it? What happens if I never do it?
Defrag is a utility invented by Uncle Bill himself.
Watching the little blocks moving around the screen is meant to calm a troubled user. Somewhere the’re hoping the defrag will sort out whatever problem they have and so by the time they actually get through to Tech Support all the fury has been drained.
But really…
Defrag is a good thing.
Windows is not incredibly adept at organising its storage of your data.It will store parts of a file in one place and the rest in another. Over time this can lead to problems as there may be huge gaps and it will slow down the seek time of your HDD.
It should be part of a regular maintenance routine and you will notice an improvment.
Watch Defrag ( hit <Show Detail> ) as it goes about its work and you will see exactly what it does.
I generally set defrag running when the drive has reached 4%. That said over Christmas we disconnected four servers and set them to defrag for a week. The best one came back with 83%!!
Imagine a concert being sold through Ticketmaster. Different sized groups buy tickets, and they’re always given the best seats available. Now imagine a group of 3 in the first row cancel their seats. Then a group of 5 shows up and wants to buy tickets. Now they have two choices: they can either take seats in the back, or they can split up. If they sit in the back, their view is worse and they’re unhappy. If they split up, it makes it a lot tougher for them to talk to each other, and kind of ruins the experience. Now imagine that a few more groups in the front cancel, and you have to repeat that choice again and again. Eventually the concert hall will fill up, but with lots of gaps, and the new ticket buyers must choose to split up. So more and more of the concertgoers become split up, and the general happiness goes down. 
Got it? Well, the concert is a disk drive. Each group of people is a file. People cancelling tickets are files being deleted. Splitting up the group is exactly the same as fragmenting a file. Happiness of a group is analogous to speed of access to a file.
And to answer the OP, defragmenting the concert hall would mean rearranging the people so that all the groups could sit together. Which makes the general happiness level goes up.
I assume you’re referring to hard disk defragmentation. Hard drives have sectors. When files are written to the hard drive, they span multiple sectors. The larger the file, the more sectors are used. Ideally, the file is written to adjacent sectors. This allows the drive heads moving across the platter to travel less when reading the file as it’s requested. Less travel=greater speed. The drive becomes fragmented as files are deleted and new files are added. Essentially, the drive fills up nooks and crannies as it writes the newer files rather than looking for an area of free space which is large enough to accomodate the file in one contiguous space. This fragmentation results in parts of the file being written in sectors which are not contiguous. As a result, it takes longer for the drive to read the requested file. Using a utility to defragment the drive rearranges the files on a drive so that each file is written so it’s component pieces are written adjacent to each other. If you never defragment your drive, you will notice a slowdown over time, especially if you regularly delete and add new files, which is pretty much a by-product of normal computer use.
Defragmentation isn’t the only component of accessing files most efficiently. There is also optimization. In addition to defragmentation, optimization also places the most used files and directories at the beginning of the disk. Unused space on the drive is also defragmented so that new files are written to adjacent sectors.
When you’re drive becomes less then about 85 or 90% optimized, running a full optimization will usually produce a noticeable improvement in speed.
“Defrag is a utility invented by Uncle Bill himself.” That’s very hard to believe. I thought Mr. Republican had a perfect record of never inventing anything. Didn’t someone like Peter Norton invent defragging?
Back to the OP: “What happens if I never do it?” I guess you reach a steady state where your level of fragmentation stops changing because every time you delete a file you decrease fragmentation just as much as you increase fragmenation every time you add a file to your badly fragmented hard drive. Of course, at this point your files are smeared all over the place and your computer is running slowly any time it has to do a lot of file accessing.
'Twere meant as a joke.
They usually crash and burn long before this
Thanksalot guys. I could ask how to optimize next, but I’ll stick to de frag.
Mods is this is a double post remove. IE gave me an 404 when I hit submit. If not a double post please remove this section
Many people have found that their system will not do a complete defrag due to Windows needing to write to the the perodicaly. I found a way to get around this it works in 95 and 98 but I can not get it to work in ME. Do the following
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Have an Emergency Boot Disk available if you mess up you will NOT be able to get into windows
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Boot from this disk and at the a:\ prompt type c:\
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Type cd\windows
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type Edit system.ini
5a) Look for the line that says shell=explorer
5b) type rem before it
6a) Hit enter on the S in Shell to add a blank line
6b) Cursor up to that blank line type “shell=c:\windows\defrag.exe”
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Save the file (Alt F, Save, Alt F, Exit)
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Remove the floppy disk
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Reboot the system
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When the defrag program comes up start it, go out for coffee, dancing, whatever this will take a LONG time
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When defrag finishes, put in the emergence disk
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Reboot
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At commeand prompt do steps 2 through 4 again
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Put the word REM at the beginning of the line you added
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Remove the REM from the original line
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Save the file (see step 7)
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Reboot
Next time you want to defrag just do steps 1-5 add REM to the beginning of the Shell= line and remove the REM from the defrag line and jump to step 7.
I didn’t degrag the drive on my main PC for a full year (used every single day for most of my work and play, installed and removed many apps during that time), and had no problems at all. I didn’t notice any improvement when I finally did a defrag after a year. I think fragmentation problems are overrated. Still, when there is a disk problem, I think fragmentation can increase the odds of losing files. Not a bad idea to defrag every couple of months, but no big deal if you don’t.
Backups, on the other hand, are essential.
I logged on to post a question about de-fragging, and what do I see in the number 2 spot…
I have a Gateway P2-300 with 64 meg ram that is about 2 years old. I used to de-frag every few months with no problem… but probably haven’t in about a year. Recently when trying to listen to a Packers game on RealPlayer it would play for a couple of minutes then lock-up. Then my son’s new Thomas the Tank Engine game started to get “jerky” (i.e. the video/audio would skip, pause, and jump) after he played it for a while.
I’m one of those people the techies love to hate… I have a BA in computer sci (Fortran punch cards up to Pascal when PC’s where toys that no comp sci person wanted to play with) who knows just enough to get himself into big trouble. Anyway, I decided to try a de-frag. Kept getting locked-up at about 4%. Cleared my caches, turned my “Hardware Acceleration” to none, changed my Virtual memory to 5,000 meg (was letting Windows 98 manage… I’ve still got approx. 5,600 out of 8 gig left). Reboot and de-frag again… got all the way to 10% watching the blocks move around before it locked again.
Any suggestions? I waited about 30 minutes without a “hit” to the hard drive (it’s right next to me so it is easy to hear) before I gave up. The “three finger salute” (<ctrl><alt><del>) tells me the system is unstable or busy, and I can only get out of it by powering off. I’m not quite ready to try MannyL’s response yet (hoping for more of a point and click solution).
Of course knowing my track record, de-frag probably has nothing to do with my original problem (but I still want to de-frag), so if anyone wants to solve that too I would be forever indebted.
-Spud
REboot in safe mode, run defrag from there. to get to safe mode, hit F8 at bootup when you get the msg starting windows 9x. you will get a menu, with the option for safe mode.
I work as a NT admin on a 10,000 user network, we run into defrag problems all the time. It really does depend on what apps you are running. MS Office can really screw up with a badly fragged drive. Of course, at a site that big, we see the worst of everything.
I’ve never been able to do a full defrag in safemode. Thats why I invented this method
I would do a Scandisk before defragging just to be sure that the file system has not been damaged.
There is a known problem with Windows Me.
Using third party defraggers, such as Norton, may cause problems when you reboot.
There is a fix for this, make sure that Me is up to date on Windows updates and the necessary help file will be installed.
Alternatively instead of waiting for things to go wrong you could look it up in Me help using Defrag as a search item and print it out ready for the fateful day.
Thats right, run scandisk FIRST & run it under DOS if you are intelligent enough to figure out how to do that.
Course, searching here for ‘defrag’ which is a unique word, would probably show no less than 100 messages on the topic.
If you search for ‘de frag’ you probably get 100,000 messages…see?
How many would I get if I search for “de fag”?
When I use this feature in newly installed Norton Utilities, it does take a helluva long time to de-frag (6 hours is not unusual) but then when it’s finished and I close it, if I don’t immediately “x” out of it, it wants to start over. Also, I defragged one day, and then just to test the system, I defragged again the next day. Same thing: 6 hours. WTF?
Thanks
Quasi
Absolutely, or at least the version Microsoft ships with Win95/98/ME was A closer look at the program will reveal a copyright notice crediting Symantec, which acquired Peter Norton’s company many years ago. Ditto for the older DOS version which, in fact, looks just like the old Norton defragmenter for DOS. Go figure.