I’ve been in the computer industry for almost 25 years now. I’ve gone from the lowest on the totem pole to the service manager, and increased in pay faster than anyone ever in two of the companies I have worked for. I’ve seen some weird things in my time. At my first job in the computer industry, my coworkers started calling me the System Master because when no one could fix a system, they would call me in. And I never found a system I couldn’t fix, unless it was unfix-able. All that to let you know, when it comes to computers, I know a little about what I am talking about.
I remember working on a system some years ago. It was at a local law firm, here in Atlanta, back in the late 80′s. This system had two other technicians dispatched, and neither one could get this system working. I was finally called in. I don’t remember too many of the specifics of what I did initially, but I remember the end result and the fix. The system was so fragmented, it was actually working, but it took over an hour to boot. This, back when DOS was the norm. Talk about a totally screwed system.
After I defragged the system, everything worked fine.
Today, we have all kinds of different system tools out there to speed up the systems under the various flavors of Windows. Some work good, some are a scam, and some are just plain fraud or malicious. However, the best tool that anyone can use – to begin with – when the system is slowing down is Windows Defrag (Disk Defragmenter). This can be a life saver, and a cheap one at that. After all, it comes with Windows!
In all my years of tech support, one of the first questions I still have to ask all of my end users when they call me for a slow system is “When did you last defrag your system?” 95% of the time I get “Defrag? What is that?” Even if it is not the first time I’ve asked them. (If you are in Tech Support, you absolutely know what I mean here.)
Microsoft has finally gotten it right in Windows 7, in more than one way. But one of the first and most basic win’s they have here is they have Defrag automatically scheduled to run on a weekly basis as a default for the operating system. Whohoo! Finally! This one feature here will probably cut out about 20% of the tech support calls that companies get with computers. I know when I made it a company standard about 2 and a half years ago, to install Diskeeper on our systems, my calls went down to almost half. People quit complaining about the system slowing down.
Defragmentation of the hard drive is sort of like exercise for humans. Keep it fit, and it will keep running at optimum for you. Too bad Microsoft can’t come out with something to let us do exercise automatically, while we sleep.
How timely. Just this past week I was talking to one of our local IT’s (I think technically he is the boss, but there are only two so its hard to tell), and he said “Don’t defrag. You don’t have to.” I couldn’t make this up it I tried. He actually said that defragging causes more problems then it solves because things often go wrong in the data transfer from sector to sector. To which my reply was “Really? Oh. Ok.” I think I will still defrag my machine when I move the files around next and delete some programs. You know, I don’t care how fast it is or how cavernous the hard drive is… shit just piled up everywhere does not make any fucking sense. It doesn’t help me find stuff faster on my messy desktop (digital and physical) to have it just haphazardly lying around, why the fuck would it work that way on my machine?
What he says used to be true when defragging first came out. It doesn’t work that way any more. You can turn off your computer by the power switch while it’s defragging, and it won’t mess up the system, or the file. It may have lost clusters when you do a scandisk the next time, but it is extremely rare that you will loose any data. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s not impossible to win the lottery either.