Defrag

On 8/18/2017 10:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?

Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button and
watching defrag do its work.

I don't leave my computer switched on. Thanks for the answers so far,
any ideas about cleanup?

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On 8/18/2017 2:30 PM, Neil wrote:
On 8/18/2017 5:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?

Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is
inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

Win7 = Vista 1.5

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button
and
watching defrag do its work.

There are many tasks that can quickly fragment files, particularly if
those files are larger than a sector in size. Knowing how to manually
run defrag is useful to those of us who do such work.

Or read the Guardian site. What a clunker.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On 8/18/2017 3:42 PM, KenW wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:30:49 -0400, Neil
wrote:

On 8/18/2017 5:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?

Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

Win7 = Vista 1.5

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button and
watching defrag do its work.

There are many tasks that can quickly fragment files, particularly if
those files are larger than a sector in size. Knowing how to manually
run defrag is useful to those of us who do such work.

There is a manual way. Get an ssd and forget defrag.
If you analyze a ssd it really looks very bad. Confused me the first
time !


KenW

What is an ssd?

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On 8/18/2017 5:20 PM, Paul wrote:
Stef wrote:
On 18/8/2017 01:25, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?
Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and
that will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

That's the default, but if your computer is turned off when defrag is
scheduled to run . . .

Isn't it about time MS released a filesystem that doesn't need
defragging? Other OSes have them. NTFS is a quarter of a century old for
god's sake! Even with all those patches installed over the years, its
foundation is still ancient technology. Time to replace it with
something better. Or enable Windows so it can use other filesystems.

Stef

I think the current design of Windows 10, handles
the situation with intelligence. Regularly scheduled
defrags keep the "percentage" number low.

They have also added something (special handling) for certain
problem files. And this seems to have been added on the later
versions of Win10.

But I have ways of creating a mess. My "100% fragmented"
volume, a small volume by the way, was the result of doing
a chromium build. And just for fun, I had the defrag.exe take
a crack at that. Well, it needed a little help, because
I wasn't meeting the minimum white space requirement. There
was no place to move the files.

In average usage, stuff like this doesn't happen. If I'd done
the software build on a regular hard drive, with lots of slack, there
would have been no issue at all. But I did the build on a RAMdisk
which was barely big enough for the job. The fragmentation makes
no difference to a RAMDisk, but I thought it would be fun to
see whether the defragmenter utility could handle a pretty severe mess.
Once I'd helped it out, it worked fine. But it couldn't get past
the first bit. Its heuristic wasn't good enough.

Microsoft has another file system. This is newer than NTFS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refs

"In addition, Windows cannot be booted from a ReFS volume."

So apparently, that's not what it is for. And I cannot tell from
that article, whether fragmentation remains an issue or not.

Paul

Thanks for that, I mean it, but this non-techhead can still use Cleanup
and Defrag at the moment and would like to do that if he gets a new
machine. Can anyone spell it out for me?

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On Sat, 19 Aug 2017 07:40:17 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 8/18/2017 9:25 AM, Davidm wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

I don't think so: the drive was quite badly fragged.
Did you see the post above from Andy:

"Right click the drive in question, properties, tools, optimise and it
will tell you the media type ...

https://www.tenforums.com/attachments/tutorials/25842d1485953034-optimize-defrag-drives-windows-10-a-optimize_drive-3.png"

You can see the status there, and adjust the settings.
I've never set mine up, W10 seems to have done it for me.

"Martin Edwards" wrote in message
news
On 8/18/2017 3:42 PM, KenW wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:30:49 -0400, Neil
wrote:

Snip

What is an ssd?


Solid State Drive
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

--
Regards
wasbit

Martin Edwards wrote:


Thanks for that, I mean it, but this non-techhead can still use Cleanup
and Defrag at the moment and would like to do that if he gets a new
machine. Can anyone spell it out for me?

When you install the OS, the setting is automatic.

But for the automation to work, the machine has to be "awake".

It's not set up to wake the machine, so it can be defragmented.

You can check the defragmentation schedule, and adjust the
date and time to suit your lifestyle.

http://www.wikihow.com/Defrag-Windows-10

At least for me, if I check on a setup that isn't
normally running at night, it never seems to get
defragmented by the automation. It's more likely to
happen, if I was doing a movie render at night, and the
machine was running all night long.

I have had the machine wake itself up, but it was for a
"scheduled reboot" that had actually already been done
hours ago. If a Windows Update activity is received,
that "requires a reboot", and you do some other thing
at the time, it can set an entry in the Task Scheduler,
to wake the machine later and do it. So I had the machine
waking up, but about five minutes later, it shut down again
when it realized there was nothing queued for it to do.

Paul

On 8/19/2017 10:44 AM, wasbit wrote:
"Martin Edwards" wrote in message
news
On 8/18/2017 3:42 PM, KenW wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:30:49 -0400, Neil
wrote:

Snip

What is an ssd?


Solid State Drive
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

Thanks.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On 8/19/2017 7:41 AM, Martin Edwards wrote:
On 8/18/2017 10:39 AM, wg_2002 wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 09:25:40 +0100, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I
have the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I
started with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the
programs. How will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it manually?

Yes it does it automatically on a weekly basis when the pc is
inactive. I
I believe it's a feature that was introduced with Vista/7. They are so
similar though that I can't remember which OS exactly.

I guess some people just like the idea of clicking the optimize button
and
watching defrag do its work.

I don't leave my computer switched on. Thanks for the answers so far,
any ideas about cleanup?

I found this out for myself. It is on the General tab.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

On 8/19/2017 10:24 AM, Davidm wrote:
On Sat, 19 Aug 2017 07:40:17 +0100, Martin Edwards
wrote:

On 8/18/2017 9:25 AM, Davidm wrote:
On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?

Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

I don't think so: the drive was quite badly fragged.
Did you see the post above from Andy:

"Right click the drive in question, properties, tools, optimise and it
will tell you the media type ...

https://www.tenforums.com/attachments/tutorials/25842d1485953034-optimize-defrag-drives-windows-10-a-optimize_drive-3.png"

You can see the status there, and adjust the settings.
I've never set mine up, W10 seems to have done it for me.

Thanks again to all who replied.

--
Myth, after all, is what we believe naturally. History is what we must
painfully learn and struggle to remember. -Albert Goldman

So many people post about political stuff nowadays, for a second
I thought the title was "Defag".

On 18/8/2017 09:20, Paul wrote:

Stef wrote:
On 18/8/2017 01:25, Davidm wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:13:26 -0000 (UTC), wg_2002
wrote:

On Fri, 18 Aug 2017 07:38:55 +0100, Martin Edwards wrote:

My defragmenter played up yesterday, but it worked this morning. I have
the icons for Disc Cleanup and Defragmenter on my desktop as I started
with W7. I now have W10 which does not let you get at the programs. How
will I get them if I get a new computer?
Open file explorer and right click on your c: drive then click on
properties at the bottom. Under the tools tab click optimize and that
will bring up the defragmenter/trim gui.
Doesn't W10 defrag in the background anyway, no need to run it
manually?

That's the default, but if your computer is turned off when defrag is
scheduled to run . . .

Isn't it about time MS released a filesystem that doesn't need
defragging? Other OSes have them. NTFS is a quarter of a century old for
god's sake! Even with all those patches installed over the years, its
foundation is still ancient technology. Time to replace it with
something better. Or enable Windows so it can use other filesystems.

Stef

I think the current design of Windows 10, handles
the situation with intelligence. Regularly scheduled
defrags keep the "percentage" number low.

They have also added something (special handling) for certain
problem files. And this seems to have been added on the later
versions of Win10.

But I have ways of creating a mess. My "100% fragmented"
volume, a small volume by the way, was the result of doing
a chromium build. And just for fun, I had the defrag.exe take
a crack at that. Well, it needed a little help, because
I wasn't meeting the minimum white space requirement. There
was no place to move the files.

In average usage, stuff like this doesn't happen. If I'd done
the software build on a regular hard drive, with lots of slack, there
would have been no issue at all. But I did the build on a RAMdisk
which was barely big enough for the job. The fragmentation makes
no difference to a RAMDisk, but I thought it would be fun to
see whether the defragmenter utility could handle a pretty severe mess.
Once I'd helped it out, it worked fine. But it couldn't get past
the first bit. Its heuristic wasn't good enough.

Microsoft has another file system. This is newer than NTFS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refs

"In addition, Windows cannot be booted from a ReFS volume."

So apparently, that's not what it is for. And I cannot tell from
that article, whether fragmentation remains an issue or not.

Ah! Yes. The Ol' Resilient File System. Read about it. Seems designed
more for servers with RAID, multiple hard drives and partitions than
single drive/single partition consumer machines. Rumored to be a
future replacement for NTFS, but that was in 2012 when it was
released with MS Server 2012, and as you said you can't boot the OS from
it. So, you still need NTFS. So, NOT a replacement, but an addendum.

And as far as defragging: In all the reading I've done no where is it
explicitly stated that it doesn't need it. So I'll surmise it does just
like NTFS. (Except on SSDs, of course) Because if it didn't, Microsoft
would be shouting that fact from the highest roof tops all over the
world.

So, don't expect a full NTFS, no-defragging-needed, replacement file
system any time soon. When or if it happens, it will be a day late and a
dollar short. Such is the way of Microsoft. For now, you'll just have to
be satisfied humming along in that utilitarian '52 Buick with the holes
in the sides and Hydra-Matic transmission. ;-)


Stef

Stef wrote:

So, don't expect a full NTFS, no-defragging-needed, replacement file
system any time soon. When or if it happens, it will be a day late and a
For now, you'll just have to be satisfied humming along in that
utilitarian '52 Buick with the holes in the sides and Hydra-Matic transmission. ;-)

Stef

But we might trade a lack of fragmentation, for
some other undesirable properly. I don't consider fragmentation
to be the end of the world.

My Chromium build volume that was 100% fragmented, this did not
stop the build from finishing. The state of the volume, was a little
difficult for the heuristic the Win10 defragmenter uses. Not a surprise
when it's expectation is that a once a week defrag keeps fragments
at the 2% level or so. One of the reasons that particular volume
was fragmented, was that NTFS Compression was turned on for the
entire partition, and that generates fragments right there. Each
file written is "gap-toothed". So that's where the rating of 100% fragmentation
came from.

Squashing the volume down, so there was 3GB of white space above
the mess, was all it needed to assist getting the job done. I know of
some commercial defragmenters which will put up a dialog instead,
asking for you to extend the volume to meet the minimum white space
requirement. And that didn't happen with the Win10 defragmenter. It
finished quickly... but made no progress. And the storage volume still
stored things.

And there's nothing wrong with old designs. I don't panic, if certain
Windows files are dated 2001. Doesn't bother me in the least. If
you do a good job the first time, that time stamp stays there. If
you bumble some part of a design, then, you're constantly changing
it, and it ends up with a 2017 date stamp. There are a lot of people
who assume a date stamp of 2001 is "nefarious", but it isn't necessarily
the case.

Paul

On 20/8/2017 12:35, Paul wrote:

Stef wrote:

So, don't expect a full NTFS, no-defragging-needed, replacement file
system any time soon. When or if it happens, it will be a day late and a
For now, you'll just have to be satisfied humming along in that
utilitarian '52 Buick with the holes in the sides and Hydra-Matic transmission. ;-)

Stef

But we might trade a lack of fragmentation, for
some other undesirable properly. I don't consider fragmentation
to be the end of the world.

But defragging is an inconvienence at the very least. But with the
transition to SSDs I guess fragmentation no longer matters and
defragging no longer necessary. But there are still millions of
spinning drives out there, and will be for a long, long time. NTFS
lacks the improvements of today's modern file systems particularly
speed, reliability, and file integrity. Its basic design just does not
permit those features to be added to it. Hence ReFS as a stop-gap
"fix." It's time NTFS was replaced.

My Chromium build volume that was 100% fragmented, this did not
stop the build from finishing. The state of the volume, was a little
difficult for the heuristic the Win10 defragmenter uses. Not a surprise
when it's expectation is that a once a week defrag keeps fragments
at the 2% level or so. One of the reasons that particular volume
was fragmented, was that NTFS Compression was turned on for the
entire partition, and that generates fragments right there. Each
file written is "gap-toothed". So that's where the rating of 100% fragmentation
came from.

Squashing the volume down, so there was 3GB of white space above
the mess, was all it needed to assist getting the job done. I know of
some commercial defragmenters which will put up a dialog instead,
asking for you to extend the volume to meet the minimum white space
requirement. And that didn't happen with the Win10 defragmenter. It
finished quickly... but made no progress. And the storage volume still
stored things.

Just consider the time wasted by HAVING to defrag to keep HD performance
optimum and the real possibility of files being lost or damaged.
Wouldn't it be better not to have to?

And there's nothing wrong with old designs. I don't panic, if certain
Windows files are dated 2001. Doesn't bother me in the least. If
you do a good job the first time, that time stamp stays there. If
you bumble some part of a design, then, you're constantly changing
it, and it ends up with a 2017 date stamp. There are a lot of people
who assume a date stamp of 2001 is "nefarious", but it isn't necessarily
the case.

You don't have to espouse to me about "old." Just because something is
old, doesn't necessarily mean it's useless. The box I'm using now, my
primary personal system, I built 10 years, and even though it's been
upgraded numerous times since -- the last time 2 years ago, a new hard
drive -- it's still fast and useful. But there will come a time when
it needs replacing even if it's still working. The same can be said of
NTFS.

Until you've used a file system that doesn't need defragging,
etc., you'll never realize the convienence. Just like that '52 Buick:
it gets you there, yes, but the ride is hard, as are the seats, no power
steering, no CD player just a clunky AM radio (no auto-tuning), no air
conditioning, and no cup holders! The 2017 model is soooo much better.
;-)


Stef

On Mon, 21 Aug 2017 15:25:44 +0000 (UTC), Stef
wrote:

But defragging is an inconvienence at the very least.

Fragmentation is not an inconvenience for me. The last time I manually
defragged one of my own systems was at least 15 years ago. I don't even
own any of those systems anymore. None of my current PCs have ever been
manually defragged. If I check the fragmentation percentage, it's always
around 2-3%, which I don't think anyone would consider to be a problem.

Two things contribute to that, I think. Windows does a rudimentary
defrag on a scheduled basis, and I don't use anything smaller than a 2TB
drive (spinner) or a 512GB drive (SSD). With plenty of open drive space,
there's very little opportunity for files to be fragmented.

But with the
transition to SSDs I guess fragmentation no longer matters and
defragging no longer necessary.

Manual defragging hasn't been necessary for well over a decade, but the
background housekeeping that Windows does may apply to SSDs, after all.
I think Paul recently quoted from an article that talked about that.

But there are still millions of
spinning drives out there, and will be for a long, long time. NTFS
lacks the improvements of today's modern file systems particularly
speed, reliability, and file integrity. Its basic design just does not
permit those features to be added to it. Hence ReFS as a stop-gap
"fix." It's time NTFS was replaced.

Just consider the time wasted by HAVING to defrag to keep HD performance
optimum and the real possibility of files being lost or damaged.
Wouldn't it be better not to have to?

I don't think we've had to for about 15 years.

Until you've used a file system that doesn't need defragging,
etc., you'll never realize the convienence.

I feel like I'm at least 15 years ahead of you. ;-)

I have what you want, I've had it for a very long time, and I wonder why
you don't also have it.