Inline:
Joni said:
Win XP
Dell Dim Media Ed E510
My hard Drive is C
My DellData Safe is Drive D (Backup)
On C Drive (hard drive) I did disk cleanup, scan disk, disk
defrag.
It is my understanding that I should not do Disk Cleanup on
D (Backup) as it would erase the backup. I should do Scan
and Disk defrag. Is this correct information?
There probably is no need to do Disk Cleanup on drive D.
I do have to wonder about the comment that Disk Cleanup would
erase "backup" files though; it makes no sense. Where did that
information come from?
All Disk Cleanup does is:
-- Remove about three different kinds of temporary files that
aren't needed any longer
-- Clear the Recycle Bin
-- Compress old files (ones that aren't being used much).
-- plus a couple other perfectly safe options that aren't
checked by default and I can't recall at the moment.
You can pick and choose everything Cleanup will remove also,
when you run it.
What exactly IS on drive D?
At any rate, it's pretty much irrelevant since the things that
get cleaned up are only created on Drive C, so that's where you
want it to run anyway and C is only place where it would give any
results.
On Win 98SE I used to run scan in safe mode because it kept
restarting. I didn't seem to have any trouble running in
normal in XP. Do you think it still might be necessary to
run scan in safe mode on the XP?
Sometimes when it won't run in regular mode, you do have to use
Safe Mode, but it's not necessary as a rule. It should be fine
without going to Safe Mode.
The selection was click on the check box next to
automatically fix file system errors
Yes, that's correct. And, if it find errors and fixes them, run
it again to see if it finds more problems. Occasionally fixing
one set of problems can expose another set of problems that
weren't visible before.
or
Click on the checkbox next to scan for an attempt recovery
of bad sectors. (Is this the same as run thorough scan that
was listed on the Win 98SE) I very seldom did this one. Should
I select it for the XP scan? each time I run the
scan?
If you're not getting error messages about bad sectors and
everything is working fine, then I usually don't bother with it.
Bad sectors are pretty much a thing of the past with today's
better hard drives, so if you do start seeing bad sectors, it's
usually a sign of an impending disk crash. I run that one very
occasionally only.
I was told to scan every 2 weeks and defrag every week. What
schedule would you suggest for both drives?
I think that's a pretty aggressive schedule for what it sounds
like your computer is, but it won't hurt anything. Unless you're
creating/deleting many megs of files on a daily basis or
installing/uninstalling programs, once a month is probably
plenty.
In general, if you wait too long to perform those, it will
start taking longer and longer to run them if things are building
up. If they seem to take an excessive length of time a couple of
times in a row, then it might be time to consider doing them more
often, but it's very likely not going to happen. Like I said, it
depends on what the machine is being used for and what's
happening on it.
Here's my schedule:
Disk Cleanup: Whenever I think of it, about once a month.
Always before I do a defrag, so if I do a defrag, I always run
Disk Cleanup first; makes less work for defrag to do<g>.
Defrag: Set in my scheduler for once a month.
I also use some programs that are very intensive programs,
mainly video editing, so while I'm using that, I'll defrag every
day, usually overnight. So in that case I might do two or three
defrags a day just to keep the disks squeaky clean for my video
apps. It save a LOT of time and prevents a lot of problems with
speed.
But, if I'm just doing everyday things, I let the scheduler
have control and run it once a month.
As you might suspect, there is no hard and fast rule about how
often to run them; it depends on the uses of the computer and
usually once a month is plenty. Some people never run them, or
run them only when they are having problems with speed of opening
programs and/or saving taking too long type problems.
Depending on what the D drive's "backup" means, there is probably
no need to clean OR defrag that, since no files are being written
to it or deleted, assuming it's some sort of recovery thing
provided by the manufacturer. If it's you writing backup files
to it though, then it should have defrag run on it now and then,
like after every few backups maybe, depending.
HTH,
Pop
