Can I defragment my drive while working ?
Is there a tool that will allow this? I have a Windows XP Pro laptop. |
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. |
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. |
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 Organization: Netfront http://www.netfront.net/ Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Fri, 25 Oct 2019 23:14:36 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: adenine.netfront.net; posting-host="65.158.15.78"; logging-data="70144"; " User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:51.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/51.0 SeaMonkey/2.48 In-Reply-To: -- With over 1,000,000 million devices now running Windows 10, customer satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows. |
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 |
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. |
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. |
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. |
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 |
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 |
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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