I was just wondering how often I should defrag. I have a 80gig 2.5ghz 256 RAM, running XP sp2. I tend to download about 20gig a month and notice the difference when I do defrag every few months or so.

I know that windows defrag tells you if it thinks you should defragment the drive, but I somehow don't have that much confidence in it. Quite a few mates have mentioned that it's changed in recent years due to the sheer volume of downloads, and so should be done very regularly.

What do you think?

I usually do a defrag once a week, but I've got several 20gig partitions so it makes the job a bit easier.

I agree with Nick. If you partition your drives up and allocate a certain area for downloads it won't drag down your PC's general operation.

I usually reserve around 30-40Gb for Windows on it's own drive, 5Gb of a second drive for the swap file, 80Gb for my music, 40Gb for personal documents, programs and DivXed videos, and 40Gb for temporary storage.

The benefit is that you can just format the temporary storage every once in a while.

Originally posted by alchresearch
I agree with Nick. If you partition your drives up and allocate a certain area for downloads it won't drag down your PC's general operation.


Yes, thats what I've done. E-mule has it's own "drive", all the "my documents" are on their own drive and the "temp" folders are one a seperate drive.

I've also made sure I install anything on a different drive to the main Windows drive C:, so D: is my "other software" drive.

It makes backing-up easier as I just backup a whole drive at a time.

Plus, if your Windows OS get stuffed you can just re-install without worrying about losing too much stuff.

Ok, so how do you partition your HDD?

If you don't fancy wiping and starting from scratch (always the best option though), you need Powerquest's PartitionMagic.

Considering the price of drives these days though, it's always a good idea to have two seperate physical drives.

Incidentally, I have an old thinkpad with a itsy bitsy 20Gb hard drive and I don't have it partitioned. I don't really store that much on it so it's less than half full. What would people recommend about partitioning it? ie what size partitions?

just to keep vaguely on topic, I tend to defrag about once a week using diskeeper lite.

best to defrag once a week unless you do lots of installing, uninstalling, downloading, ripping, copying, pasting, moving large files, then it should be more often.

If you're running NTFS then it's not as big an issue as running on FAT32. You can happily get away with out defragging for months on a 'normal' desktop PC. If your running FAT32 every week or two would be better.

Originally posted by Andy78
Incidentally, I have an old thinkpad with a itsy bitsy 20Gb hard drive and I don't have it partitioned. I don't really store that much on it so it's less than half full. What would people recommend about partitioning it? ie what size partitions?

just to keep vaguely on topic, I tend to defrag about once a week using diskeeper lite.

It depends on how full it is. I would probably do a 15Gb partition with Windows on, and a 5Gb one for the swap file.

When the Windows swap file gets caught up in with fragmented files it causes more unneccessary drive activity.

i tend to defrag at least once a month and everything works ok .. but i do fill up my hardrive and when i delete stuff i might defrag every 3 weeeks or so

thanks for your responses so far.

I have to agree with defragging once a week, especially with using a third-party program as the windows defragger obvioulsy is not that great..

Thanks for the tips on hard drive partitioning, I've just brought a nice new 3.0ghz AMD, 512 RAM 160gig hdd, so I'm looking forward to spending the space well!

I recently started using MacOSX and was puzzled why there were no defrag utilities on it. I investigated a bit and found out you don't need to defrag- At all - Never. Something to do with the mac file system and how OSX writes files to disk.

Oh, and there aren't any virus's either!

incredible! but I still couldn't face using mac's over pc's. maybe I've been brainwashed...?

Originally posted by hade


Oh, and there aren't any virus's either!
ROFLMFAO hade! :hihi: :hihi: :hihi:

No viruses......NEVER.....EVER? :suspect:

wow its the wonder mac! no there are less viruses for macs as they wouldnt spread too fast or do as much damage.