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-   -   Can I defragment my drive while working ? (http://www.pcbanter.net/showthread.php?t=1109043)

Fern October 25th 19 10:29 PM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 


Is there a tool that will allow this?

I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.

Paul in Houston TX[_2_] October 25th 19 11:54 PM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
Fern wrote:

Is there a tool that will allow this?

I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.


Doing it that way would leave the drive fragmented making defrag a waste
of time.


Fern October 26th 19 12:14 AM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 

The system is so very slow to load and get ready for me to work.
Does that mean a defrag is needed or something else ?


Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Fern wrote:

Is there a tool that will allow this?

I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.


Doing it that way would leave the drive fragmented making defrag a waste
of time.


😉 Good Guy 😉 October 26th 19 12:25 AM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
On 26/10/2019 00:14, Fern wrote:

The system is so very slow to load and get ready for me to work.
Does that mean a defrag is needed or something else ?


How about formatting the hard disk and starting again from scratch? How
old is the machine and did you buy some popular brands such as DELL or
HP? You might have a partition to reset the machine to factory settings
and this might be the best option.

Defrag, disk clean-up tools, registry cleanser etc rarely help in
situation such as yours. You could try creating a new windows
profile/account and see if that account is any faster. Sometimes it is
the profile that is bloated because of all the trial software & other
3rd party tools that people install without knowing who makes them and
why they are free.


Is your name Fern in real life all are you some other known nym-shifter
trying to fool us to enter into dialogue with you?

From: Fern
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general
Subject: Can I defragment my drive while working ?
Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 16:14:35 -0700
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J. P. Gilliver (John)[_7_] October 26th 19 12:48 AM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
In message , Fern
writes:

The system is so very slow to load and get ready for me to work.
Does that mean a defrag is needed or something else ?

_Likely_ to be something else. Has this started recently or been that
way a while? Does Task manager (taskmgr, select Performance tab) show
memory usage higher than (or close to) the amount of memory shown as
available? Does a SMART utility (I use
https://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup/ - the free one; there are
plenty of others) show a soon projected failure date, or reallocated or
pending sectors?

When you say "slow to load and get ready for me to work", do you mean
it's slow to boot, but is OK once booted? (If so, is it fine while doing
most things but slows down when it accesses the HD, or fine regardless?)

How full is the HD - or rather, how much space is unused, which is more
relevant than the _percentage_ used?

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Fern wrote:

Is there a tool that will allow this?

I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.


Doing it that way would leave the drive fragmented making defrag a waste
of time.

Well ... depends whether Fern means while actually using the computer,
or just having booted it. If the latter, although in theory still some
fragmentation, in practice less, especially if started in safe mode. But
I've rarely found fragmentation to be the cause of slowdown, unless
there's _very_ little space _left_ on the disc.

Anyway, the built-in defragmenter will do _some_thing if run while
Windows is open.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

The first banjo solo I played was actually just a series of mistakes. In fact
it was all the mistakes I knew at the time. - Tim Dowling, RT2015/6/20-26

Paul[_32_] October 26th 19 01:32 AM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
Fern wrote:

The system is so very slow to load and get ready for me to work.
Does that mean a defrag is needed or something else ?


These would be my priorities, most important first.

1) Do you have a recent backup image made of the hard drive ?
What if the drive stopped working ?
What would you do ?

This is an example of a free backup program.
You store the backup image on a USB connected hard drive,
network attached storage (NAS), file sharing on a second computer,
and so on. You do *not* store the backup image on
the same drive that you suspect is "sick".

There are at least 20 programs that do backups. Several
brands provide free versions (which do the all-important
"basic" "save my ass" kind of backup). You can pay money
to add various kinds of automation to the backups, but that's
not necessary when you need to make one backup now, before it
is too late.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

2) Once the backup is made, of all the partitions on the
hard drive, you can play a bit.

http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe

The Health tab shows the hard drive internally-maintained
S.M.A.R.T statistics.

The Benchmark curve is a more sensitive test of drive performance.
If there was, say, a 50GB wide swath of disk surface responding
at only 10MB/sec, that would tell you that you need a new drive.
The little spikes in my captured traces in this picture, are
nothing to worry about. Note as well, there are some "yellow"
marks in the Health screen, and you can ignore those, as the
yellow bits happen on brand new drives to, and are a cosmetic
issue with this ten year old program.

https://i.postimg.cc/nc7w0Chr/HDTune-ST3500418-AS.gif

3) Now that we got the important stuff done, we can dream
about defragmentation.

The Windows built-in defrag has an "Analyze" button, which
does a perfectly fine analysis of drive fragmentation level.
You can use this as part of your investigation.

In File Explorer, right click the C: drive and select Properties,
then Tools, then Defragment Now. The drive you selected when
doing the Properties ( C: ) will be highlighted. Click the Analyze
button, but be prepared to wait a couple minutes if the fragmentation
is bad.

*******

The defragmenter on WinXP was written by President Software. It's
a fine defragmenter, in that it "packs the blocks to the left" of
the screen, like a hero. What it doesn't do, is any "white space"
defragmentation.

When a software has this defect, after the defragmentation run is
completed, new fragmentation happens faster than if the drive content
were "laid out fresh" via things like a Restore with your backup software.

So while you can click the Defragment button, and wait 8 to 16 hours
for it to complete, the results may not have any really long-lasting
effects.

Once you've got the results of the "Analyze" button from the
built-in defragmenter, you can post back your results, and we
can talk further about fixes. I think the build-in defragmenter
can help, but the time to completion is pretty long. Also, if this
is a laptop, you'll want to leave it plugged in, in case the
defrag takes 16 hours or something.

My guess is, something is the matter with the drive, and the results
of (2) will outclass anything you're seeing in (3).

Paul

Paul in Houston TX wrote:
Fern wrote:

Is there a tool that will allow this?

I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.


Doing it that way would leave the drive fragmented making defrag a waste
of time.


VanguardLH[_2_] October 26th 19 04:17 PM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
Paul in Houston TX wrote:

Fern wrote:

Is there a tool that will allow this?
I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.


Doing it that way would leave the drive fragmented making defrag a
waste of time.


Except the OS is active and accessing and updating files during the
entire defrag operation which, according to your logic, means a defrag
would never be valuable.

Even if you booted a disc or USB drive to run an OS from there to run a
defrag while the target disk's OS remained quiescent, the moment you
reboot into that OS then files are getting accessed and updated to undo
some "perfect" defrag. Defrag is never meant to be perfect nor long
lasting.

VanguardLH[_2_] October 26th 19 04:19 PM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
Fern wrote:

The system is so very slow to load and get ready for me to work. Does
that mean a defrag is needed or something else ?


Boot in Windows' safe mode. That eliminates loading of all the startup
programs you've installed. Check responsiveness of your setup while in
safe mode.

Once in safe mode, use Task Manager to see how much system memory is
free. Do the same when you boot into Windows normal mode.

Shadow October 26th 19 06:46 PM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
On Fri, 25 Oct 2019 14:29:06 -0700, Fern wrote:



Is there a tool that will allow this?


Yes, and since drives fragment all the time, defragging while
using it will not interfere much in how many are still fragmented when
it's done.

I have a Windows XP Pro laptop.


First check your drives need defragging.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/ult...release/7.1.3/

I use the portable version:

ultradefrag-portable-7.1.3.bin.i386.zip

Unzip that, run it and select all your partitions. Press F5
It will analyze all your partitions.
I don't defrag unless fragmentation is 4%

If the drive is badly fragmented, I use MyDefrag.

https://filehippo.com/download_mydefrag/

Usually the "weekly" option. "System Disk Weekly" for the C:
drive, and "Data Disk Weekly" for the others.
It'll put large data files at the end of the partition, and
frequently used and executable/boot files at the beginning. And leave
a "gap" for files that might be in use.

If your drive is not badly fragmented, I'd look for other
culprits for the "slowness".
[]'s


--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012

Paul[_32_] October 26th 19 08:11 PM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
Shadow wrote:


If your drive is not badly fragmented, I'd look for other
culprits for the "slowness".
[]'s


You don't run defrag on an injured disk.

You do a backup first.

Then you can do whatever you feel like, without fear.

Defragmenting involves a lot of head movement,
and it involves writes. If the disk is running low
on spares, or if the Reallocated is constantly
growing with the writes you're doing, you are
treading on thin ice.

Paul

Shadow October 26th 19 08:41 PM

Can I defragment my drive while working ?
 
On Sat, 26 Oct 2019 15:11:38 -0400, Paul
wrote:

Shadow wrote:


If your drive is not badly fragmented, I'd look for other
culprits for the "slowness".
[]'s


You don't run defrag on an injured disk.


Agreed. I'm assuming his drive is OK.

You do a backup first.


I do a partial one every day (important data). My last drive
burned the controller. The disk itself was perfect, according to SMART
(HDSentinel), right up to the "poof, it's gone".

Then you can do whatever you feel like, without fear.

Defragmenting involves a lot of head movement,
and it involves writes. If the disk is running low
on spares, or if the Reallocated is constantly
growing with the writes you're doing, you are
treading on thin ice.


IAWT.
But the OP was asking about defragmenting. I gave my routine.
UltraDefrag doesn't pound the drive much when it does a simple
analysis. If that analysis shows it's only slightly fragmented, there
are a lot of other things it could be: startups, corrupted drivers,
failing MB or drive, malware, even a loose DVD cable - the cause of my
last computer's "freezes for 20 seconds then works normally".
[]'s
--
Don't be evil - Google 2004
We have a new policy - Google 2012


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