Do Windows XP PC's require defrag?

[Bible John]

I believe that Mac OSX does not, and so I wonder about Windows.


John
--
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
CERM-Church Education Resource Ministries
http://www.cerm.info

 

[JS]

Unless your hard drive is really really fragmented there is little to be
gained. I have not defragged my system drive on one of my PCs in more than 8
months, I use to defrag this PC on a monthly basis but things seem fine and
just as fast as they did 8 months ago.

JS

 

[Guest]

Who cares what MAC pcs are doing,windows based all do.As far as the other
post said "8 months with-out a defrag",that might work if you browse the
internet from time to time & never install anything else but updates,but the
other 95% of pc users need to,gamers do almost daily...

 

[Gordon]

,but the other 95% of pc users need to,gamers do almost daily...

WHY do you persist with your ignorant rubbish? There is NO need to defrag
ANY Windows XP computer daily. In fact monthly is usually more frequent than
is necessary for the average user. The Windows XP file manager is much more
efficient than the old Win9x version...

 

[Gordon]

I believe that Mac OSX does not, and so I wonder about Windows.

It does depend on usage to a certain extent, but for the average user, once
a month is usually more than enough. The answer is to do a check every so
often....

 

[sareth]

If you use FAT (win 9x), fragmentation can be a big problem. With NTFS
(XP, Vista), the impact of fragmentation is reduced somewhat but not
completely negated.

It is good practice to defrag the drive regularly - about once a week,
despite others' claims of it making no difference. If the drive is
heavily fragmented, then the defrag will take longer, and you ought to
defrag more often then so it doesnt come to that stage. For light
fragmentation, it will take only a few mins anyway, so you are not
wasting much time.

Defragmentation can have a performance impact on games or other
programs that involve frequent disk I/O. Moreover, defragmentation
prolongs the life of the drive since the R/W head has to do less work
in picking up a contiguous file compared to a fragmented file.

I personally stopped worrying about manual defrags and how often I need
to defrag since I switched to Diskeeper 2007. Its set on autodefragment
and runs in the background without bothering my gaming or other
resource intensive activities. Defrags when it needs to and gets a
chance during idle time. So far, so good.

 

[Gordon]

It is good practice to defrag the drive regularly - about once a week,

For the average office worker that's far too frequently. W9x, yes. NTFS,
once a month is usually more than adequate...

 

[Dave B.]

Your a quack, I'm a heavy gamer and hardly ever defrag (I frag allot
though!) Unless you do allot of installs and uninstalls there's really no
need. One of these days Andrew you will get a clue.

--

 

[Curt Christianson]

Hi John,

I agree with Gordon and Dave. Apparently unlike the 9x versions of Windows,
I find XP very rarely needs defragmentation. It seems most needed after
*extensive* installing/uninstalling of applications. And please, ignore
Andrew E.'s comments. He has a tendency to get the facts turned around.
(Polite explanation !).

--
HTH,
Curt

Windows Support Center
www.aumha.org
Practically Nerded,...
http://dundats.mvps.org/Index.htm

|I believe that Mac OSX does not, and so I wonder about Windows.
|
|
| John
| --
| Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death,
| but the gift of God is eternal life
| in Christ Jesus our Lord.
| CERM-Church Education Resource Ministries
| http://www.cerm.info

 

[Ice]

I solved that buying Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier. Automatically defrag drives
when computer is in idle mode (if necessary). Great program!

 

[Lil' Dave]

I believe that Mac OSX does not, and so I wonder about Windows.


John
--
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death,
but the gift of God is eternal life
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
CERM-Church Education Resource Ministries
http://www.cerm.info

XP itself does not need regular defragmentation of an NTFS boot partition.
However, I've found it wise to do a defrag immediately before using my
partition imaging program. That is, before imaging the XP boot partition.
Since this occurs once a week here, so does a defrag. I also do similar
before the monthly cloning.

Another personal observation, the defrag that comes with XP is somewhat
crippled compared to its retail counterpart. Along those same lines, beware
retail defrag software advertisements. They are, in my opinion,
exaggerating immensely.
Dave

 

[Bob I]

Considering you could do the same with the included Task Scheduler and
the included Defrag, I'm not sure what benefit you received.

 

[frodo]

don't forget that xp does a "boot optimization" automatically every couple
of days (unless you've turned it off). This is a quick background
optimization that defrags the files needed to boot the system, as well as
the most frequently launched applications. It runs only when the system
goes idle (ie, the screen saver is up), so you've probably never noticed
that it's happened. That's why XP doesn't seem to really "need"
defragging, it's already doing it for you.

 

[Lil' Dave]

Okay.
Where do you turn it off?
Turn it on?
Dave

 

[JS]

See: http://arstechnica.com/guides/tweaks/sgp-tweaks.ars

Is it worth it???
JS

 

[frodo]

Okay.
Where do you turn it off?
Turn it on?
Dave

tweakui has the setting: General | Optimize Hard Disk when Idle

 

[Lil' Dave]

tweakui has the setting: General | Optimize Hard Disk when Idle

And what if you (like myself for instance), always turn off the PC (dead in
the water) when not in use?
Dave

 

[Bob I]

And what if you (like myself for instance), always turn off the PC (dead in
the water) when not in use?
Dave

Idle means "not active", how much of the time are you actually clicking
and typing?

 

[Lil' Dave]

First sentence: "don't forget that xp does a "boot optimization"
automatically every couple
of days (unless you've turned it off)."
Dave

 

[Bob I]

Sorry, someone removed that from the quote. My apologies.