"Deleting all the 'junk' on my hard drive made my computer run faster"

[Grant Baxter]

I hear this all the time from people who think they are computer
savvy. I cannot come up with any reasons why this could be true.
(except maybe a situation where one has so many files on the HD that
it impacts the size of the swap file such that it impacts
performance).

I think this is one of those anecdotal "urban myth" type of beliefs by
people. Like the guy who tried to tell me that the reason his buddies'
computer speeded up after using a reg cleaner was that "now XP doesn't
have to scan through so many junk keys every time it accesses the
registry". His belief being that every time XP needs to access the
registry it scans through starting at the top.

Will deleting all the "junk" from one's HD make the computer run
faster? If so, how?

TIA,

grant

 

[Raymond J. Johnson Jr.]

I hear this all the time from people who think they are computer
savvy. I cannot come up with any reasons why this could be true.
(except maybe a situation where one has so many files on the HD that
it impacts the size of the swap file such that it impacts
performance).

I think this is one of those anecdotal "urban myth" type of beliefs by
people. Like the guy who tried to tell me that the reason his buddies'
computer speeded up after using a reg cleaner was that "now XP doesn't
have to scan through so many junk keys every time it accesses the
registry". His belief being that every time XP needs to access the
registry it scans through starting at the top.

Will deleting all the "junk" from one's HD make the computer run
faster? If so, how?

TIA,

grant

It is a myth, to a certain extent, especially when it comes to registry
cleaners. Having junk in temp folders can occasionally cause specific
problems, and it's a good idea to clean them out occasionally. XP's Disk
Cleanup function works nicely for this purpose. There have been a lot
of discussions here about the relative merits of registry cleaning, but
none of the people who tout it ever have any objective evidence that it
does anything other than separating gullible people from their money.
The registry in XP is best left alone unless there is a *specific*
problem that one has good reason to believe is being caused by something
in it.

 

[Raymond J. Johnson Jr.]

I hear this all the time from people who think they are computer
savvy. I cannot come up with any reasons why this could be true.
(except maybe a situation where one has so many files on the HD that
it impacts the size of the swap file such that it impacts
performance).

I think this is one of those anecdotal "urban myth" type of beliefs by
people. Like the guy who tried to tell me that the reason his buddies'
computer speeded up after using a reg cleaner was that "now XP doesn't
have to scan through so many junk keys every time it accesses the
registry". His belief being that every time XP needs to access the
registry it scans through starting at the top.

Will deleting all the "junk" from one's HD make the computer run
faster? If so, how?

TIA,

grant

I just inadvertently sent a response to your e-mail address, which I
shouldn't be able to do. Never post your real address in a newsgroup.
The spammers have harvesting bots that scan the groups for "live"
addresses, as you will probably soon find out the hard way.

 

[Leythos]

Will deleting all the "junk" from one's HD make the computer run
faster? If so, how?

File fragmentation is always a concern once the level of fragmentation
starts impacting performance. You see this on systems with marginal
space remaining for files.

In some instances you see a marked difference in performance as the
read-write heads don't have to MOVE to another sector across the disk,
they can just keep moving in a sequential manner. On fragmented disks,
any file that is fragmented requires the heads to move to another place,
which requires a read/write delay, before data movement can resume.

On a drive with 50% free space, fragmentation, in most cases, means
little and there should be enough space that the drive has very little
fragmentation, but, keep in mind that a drive will fill sequentially,
meaning that of you have a 100MB file, and the next space free is only
50MB, it will break the file into two (or more) parts - it does not look
for an open 100MB space.

In the early days I owned a 386/16 and a single drive, I had to sort a
30MB file and it was taking forever, I estimated 28 days to complete the
sort. Understanding the mechanics of the head having to read, then move
across the drive to an open space, write, then return and repeat, I
bought another hard drive for the system. When I ran the sort this time
I told the application to read from drive 1 and write output to drive 2,
it was done in 13 hours. This has little to do with fragmentation, but
it's a good example of how head movement can cause delays.

The same is true with the registry, the less you have to search the
faster a registry call will be.

 

[R. McCarty]

Performance can be enhanced by "Removing Junk" but not in the
traditional thinking. Most applications like to install what's called
Startups & Watchdog applets and services. When you remove
the application those components go as well. Things like Quicken
Billminder, QuickTime and others can really impact a PC's boot
time and quiescent memory footprint. Almost all OEM's install a
number of dubious use applications to make the user feel like he
or her are getting their money's worth. Then applications try to be
the default for their function, so they add monitoring tools. Just
take a new PC out of the box and run MsConfig and look at all
the things that run at bootup on the PC. I recently worked on a
new Dell desktop that had 31 startups on it.

 

[Raymond J. Johnson Jr.]

File fragmentation is always a concern once the level of fragmentation
starts impacting performance. You see this on systems with marginal
space remaining for files.

In some instances you see a marked difference in performance as the
read-write heads don't have to MOVE to another sector across the disk,
they can just keep moving in a sequential manner. On fragmented disks,
any file that is fragmented requires the heads to move to another place,
which requires a read/write delay, before data movement can resume.

On a drive with 50% free space, fragmentation, in most cases, means
little and there should be enough space that the drive has very little
fragmentation, but, keep in mind that a drive will fill sequentially,
meaning that of you have a 100MB file, and the next space free is only
50MB, it will break the file into two (or more) parts - it does not look
for an open 100MB space.

In the early days I owned a 386/16 and a single drive, I had to sort a
30MB file and it was taking forever, I estimated 28 days to complete the
sort. Understanding the mechanics of the head having to read, then move
across the drive to an open space, write, then return and repeat, I
bought another hard drive for the system. When I ran the sort this time
I told the application to read from drive 1 and write output to drive 2,
it was done in 13 hours. This has little to do with fragmentation, but
it's a good example of how head movement can cause delays.

The same is true with the registry, the less you have to search the
faster a registry call will be.

Your allusion to a dinosaur machine and hard drive is the source of the
current fallacious beliefs about compulsive defgragging. Modern drives
are much smaller physically and much, much faster, making the need for
defragging much less significant. Add NTFS to the mix and regular
defragging is unnecessary. In fact, the argument could be made that the
significant activity of defragging actually shortens the life of the
drive. Perhaps not by much, depending on how often one defrags, but in
most cases there's no real payback unless there's a specific performance
issue.

 

[Art]

Your allusion to a dinosaur machine and hard drive is the source of the
current fallacious beliefs about compulsive defgragging. Modern drives are
much smaller physically and much, much faster, making the need for
defragging much less significant. Add NTFS to the mix and regular
defragging is unnecessary. In fact, the argument could be made that the
significant activity of defragging actually shortens the life of the
drive. Perhaps not by much, depending on how often one defrags, but in
most cases there's no real payback unless there's a specific performance
issue.

Raymond Johnson, as usual, brings a practical and sensible approach to this
issue as he has previously done with respect to the multi-partitioning craze
that seems to be so prevalent these days.

With respect to the supposed value of defragmenting hard disks in today's
personal computer environment, you may be interested in a report in the
February, 2004 issue of PC World magazine, in which they reported their
evaluation of defragmenters. Here's the pertinent excerpt from their
article...

"When the PC World Test Center set out to determine the effectiveness of the
defrag utilities in our set of suites, plus that of Diskeeper 8 from
Executive Software, our analysts found no evidence that defragmentation
enhanced performance. On a desktop system from the PC World office with a
heavily used, never-defragmented hard drive, the lab conducted speed tests
using a range of applications before and after defragmenting the drive with
each utility. In the end, the Test Center saw no significant performance
improvement after defragmenting with any program. This result flies in the
face of the perceived wisdom that fragmentation hinders performance, though
much older PCs (with slower and smaller hard drives) and heavily used
servers may benefit more from defragging."

I might add that about three years ago, some colleagues and myself performed
rather extensive tests of a number of third-party defragmenters as well as
the built-in defragmenters in Windows 98 and Windows Me, and to some extent,
in Windows 95. Our objective was to determine which one(s) were most
effective in defragmenting a hard disk in terms of enhancing speed
performance. To our surprise (at least for most of us!) we came to the
conclusion that *none* of the defragmenters resulted in any performance
enhancement. We measured some of the common tasks undertaken by the computer
user, e.g., bootup time, accessing programs, search & replace functions,
manipulating digital images, and the like. The conclusion we drew was
identical to that of PC World, i.e., there was no meaningful performance
enhancement resulting from the use of defragmenters. At the time we
concluded these tests Windows XP was just coming online so we didn't conduct
any extensive tests on that OS, but from some cursory tests we ran using
XP's built-in defragmenting utility, our previous conclusions concerning the
ineffectiveness of the defragmentation process remained unchanged.

Art

 

[Bruce Chambers]

"When the PC World Test Center set out to determine the effectiveness of the
defrag utilities in our set of suites, plus that of Diskeeper 8 from
Executive Software, our analysts found no evidence that defragmentation
enhanced performance.

I'll see PC World's single computer (where defragmenting the hard drive
didn't improve performance) and raise you the hundreds of machines I've
personally see improve in performance and stability after a defrag.

Defragmentation may not be as important today as it used to be, but is
still can make a noticable difference on a very great many systems - a
difference that one doesn't need benchmarking software to see.

--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH

 

[Raymond J. Johnson Jr.]

I'll see PC World's single computer (where defragmenting the hard
drive didn't improve performance) and raise you the hundreds of machines
I've personally see improve in performance and stability after a defrag.

Defragmentation may not be as important today as it used to be, but
is still can make a noticable difference on a very great many systems -
a difference that one doesn't need benchmarking software to see.

Bullsh*t. You poo-poo objective testing with subjective opinions. Show
me your data. And here's a hint: "I know it when I see it" ain't data.

 

[Leythos]

Your allusion to a dinosaur machine and hard drive is the source of the
current fallacious beliefs about compulsive defgragging. Modern drives
are much smaller physically and much, much faster, making the need for
defragging much less significant. Add NTFS to the mix and regular
defragging is unnecessary. In fact, the argument could be made that the
significant activity of defragging actually shortens the life of the
drive. Perhaps not by much, depending on how often one defrags, but in
most cases there's no real payback unless there's a specific performance
issue.

You, and I know you won't agree, have no idea about drive mechanics or
performance.

Any movement of a head, will shorten the mechanical life of the drive,
there is no one that will argue that.

And NTFS gets fragmented as much as any other Windows format - I should
know, I have hundreds of servers and workstations that I see it on
daily.

Where you messed up is looking at large drives, most of them are not
near full, so fragmentation is minimal in most cases. When a drive nears
full it will start fragmenting badly and will benefit from a full
defrag.

In most cases there is a real payback on a severely fragmented drive,
and if you take the time to test it you will find it to be true. Heavily
used drives, where users add/delete items, will benefit from defragging.

 

[Leythos]

With respect to the supposed value of defragmenting hard disks in today's
personal computer environment, you may be interested in a report in the
February, 2004 issue of PC World magazine, in which they reported their
evaluation of defragmenters. Here's the pertinent excerpt from their
article...

I hate to tell you this, but their testing was as flawed as the anyone
who thinks that defragging a drive is of no benefit.

I bought a PC, it was a Zeoz Pantera after reading reviews in PC Mag for
almost a year about how it was rated as the #1 or #2 in all of their
reviews - turns out that Zeos had a LOT of advertising money invested in
PC Mag - the Zeos was a dog, needed three motherboards in 6 months, was
still using soldered wires for irq lines, and was a POS.

If you've not tested something yourself you would be wise to listen to
those of us that manage networks and systems all over the country on
many platforms.

Again, on a drive that is marginal free space, defragmentation will
benefit the user. On a large drive, with 50% free space, fragmentation
will be little issue, unless the drive is part of an architecture where
deletes and adds are heavy or extreme.

 

[Raymond J. Johnson Jr.]

You, and I know you won't agree, have no idea about drive mechanics or
performance.

Any movement of a head, will shorten the mechanical life of the drive,
there is no one that will argue that.

And NTFS gets fragmented as much as any other Windows format - I should
know, I have hundreds of servers and workstations that I see it on
daily.

Where you messed up is looking at large drives, most of them are not
near full, so fragmentation is minimal in most cases. When a drive nears
full it will start fragmenting badly and will benefit from a full
defrag.

In most cases there is a real payback on a severely fragmented drive,
and if you take the time to test it you will find it to be true. Heavily
used drives, where users add/delete items, will benefit from defragging.

You make the unwarranted assumption that I *haven't* tested and that I'm
ignorant of hard drive mechanics. Fact: There *is* objective data
available that indicates that in general, the benefits of defragging are
negligible. Another fact: You have no objective evidence to the
contrary. See my response to Bruce Chambers in this thread.

 

[Leythos]

You make the unwarranted assumption that I *haven't* tested and that I'm
ignorant of hard drive mechanics. Fact: There *is* objective data
available that indicates that in general, the benefits of defragging are
negligible. Another fact: You have no objective evidence to the
contrary. See my response to Bruce Chambers in this thread.

I have tons of evidence that defragmenting a system benefits all users
of the system, I've been seeing it for many years.

Even defragging a RAID 5 Array can benefit the users of the data.

How about that MS Access database file that is 2GB in size that's spread
all over a drive - if you don't think that defragging it will make a
difference then I have nothing more I can say that will help you
understand.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Bullsh*t. You poo-poo objective testing with subjective opinions. Show
me your data. And here's a hint: "I know it when I see it" ain't data.

And resorting to an obsenity is?

Admittedly, anecdotal "evidence" is of no value in arguments of pure
logic, but that's irrelevant to my point. I never claimed to be report
the data resulting from a scientific experiment; I was mentioning the
real world. I, and many others, have personally observed the
performance difference that defraging can make on computers used by real
people, performing real tasks, in the field. I've never seen the point
of using a stop-watch to measure obvious changes. Nor do I really care
how little difference it makes to benchmarking software in a labortory
environment.

What would be more interesting would be to see these testing labs
explain why their results are so at varience with everyday field
experience and observation.

Now, if you don't want to defrag your hard drives, don't. I'll
continue to do so, when warranted,


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH

 

[R. McCarty]

Simple Analogy - One sheet of paper on a windy day is dropped,
you reach down pick it up once and your done. Same sheet of
paper cut into 25 pieces, you bend down and pick up 25 pieces.
Which one requires less effort ? Less effort equates to greater
performance - does it not ?

 

[Richard Urban]

Yep!

Compacting and then defragging make a huge difference - especially on a
mostly full drive. I have experience with an Access file that is
approximately 12 gig (as of 1 week ago). What a difference after doing the
mentioned procedures.

The business owner is hesitant to do it himself so he pays me to come in
every two weeks to do it after the crew has left.

I love it. Easy money!

--

Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

If you knew half as much as you think you know,
You'd realize you didn't know what you thought you knew!

 

[Leythos]

The business owner is hesitant to do it himself so he pays me to come in
every two weeks to do it after the crew has left.

I agree, the same with Exchange Server databases, even MS SQL databases
can be fragmented across many files segments - in the case of MS SQL
it's best to size it right the first time so that it doesn't need to
grow and fragment.

 

[Grant Baxter]

File fragmentation is always a concern once the level of fragmentation
starts impacting performance. You see this on systems with marginal
space remaining for files.

O.K. Here's where this thread went off-course. (And then careened off
on a "Mine is bigger than yours" debate.) Defragging is not deleting
files. I want to know if deleting a bunch of extraneous files from
one's hard drive can improve performance. I don't mean defragging.

Thanks,

grant

 

[Leythos]

O.K. Here's where this thread went off-course. (And then careened off
on a "Mine is bigger than yours" debate.) Defragging is not deleting
files. I want to know if deleting a bunch of extraneous files from
one's hard drive can improve performance. I don't mean defragging.

Ok, in general, removing files off a computer does not really impact
performance, except as follows:

New files being added to the system after deletion of the old ones, or
expansion of files that are adjacent to the blocks deleted, may take
space that is no longer fragmented, this would make access to those
types of files more efficient, and that means a performance increase. It
would not impact performance of any existing files unless those files
were modified as in above.

So, in general, deleting content, while the act of deleting will not
impact performance, if it provides space to files added/modified to not
be fragmented, then you should see some benefit.

 

[Leythos]

You should take a moment and think real hard and try and come to an
understanding of just how pointless and nonsensical your analogy is.

Actually, I thought he did a good job of explaining Fragmentation. It's
not called file fragmentation because the file parts are sequential and
stacked next to each other