Computer stuff

[theyellowhobbit]

Having a new computer has shown me how slow my old one is. I'm deleting all the files on the old machine that are on my new one or the external hard drive (with the exception of some pictures that I'd like in my screensaver and my music). I'm also going to defrag it, though I need to come up with a bit more space. Now I'm uninstalling my demo of GIS, which takes up 942 MB!!! And this uninstallation is taking forever. (It estimates 54 22 98 68 35 28 more minutes. (I'm sure it will change again by the time you read this.) GIS is so insanely huge! But it's a very complex program, so it makes sense. I'm relieved to be done with it for now. I'm so bad at it.)

Defragging is annoying and takes forever on my slow old Lappy, which is probably why I never did it. Also because it ate up all of the computer's functioning, and I couldn't do anything else on the machine. But now I can defrag easily, and just use the new computer. And when I need to defrag the new computer, I can just use the old one!

Defragging should be done monthly. I know. I'm a bad person. But I'll try to be better now that i won't die if I can't use my computer for a while.

Comments

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

Defragging should be done monthly. I know. I'm a bad person. But I'll try to be better now that i won't die if I can't use my computer for a while.

LOL. Brings back memories. Mostly bad. :-)

Unless your filesystem actually is fragmented, I'd never found defragmenting giving any significant speed improvement. In the Windows world, FAT/FAT32 usually fragments faster than NTFS. The biggest slowdown on Windows systems is usually anti-virus software (you can actually experience the speed difference on systems not using a/v and those that do -- of course, one shouldn't run Windows w/o antivirus software, but it's a good academic exercise). Second comes all the crap that gets installed in system directories and loaded and startup, but never removed.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

So what kind of stuff can I go and remove?

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

I'm not that good of a Windows admin. :-)

The best I'd ever done with similar issues is formatting the drive and reinstalling the system. If you're moving data/backing it up to another computer, and your current one is very slow, it might be the best solution I could come up with.

The problem is even better solved if what gets reinstalled is not Windows.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

Actually, my brother said a while back that I should reformat the hard drive. At this point I probably could do so, now that mostly everything is backed up on that system. And Jon knows how to do these things, so maybe he'll be nice and reformat it during break.

Though my new system is fast enough that there's no problem with it. The space on the computer is mostly free, and there certainly isn't anything as huge as GIS on there (as a comparison, Office is 170 MB.)

And when I defragged last time, my system did run faster. Just not fast enough. Though on the other computer that was the first time defragging since I got it 2.5 prior to then. And now it has been 6.5 months. A lot was fragmented on there in both cases.

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

Is your file system VFAT or NTFS? Your usage pattern may also be different from the ones of the other people's machines I'd seen.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

VFAT? NTFS? Could you translate into non-compsci terms?

[elfsdh.livejournal.com]

A filesystem is the way the computer indexes files on the hard drive.

FAT is the old DOS filesystem. Pointers to files are stored in (12 or) 16 bits. Filenames were limited to 8 characters+a 3 letter extension, non case sensitive.

FAT32, aka VFAT, is an extension of the FAT filesystem introduced in Windows 95 that overcame the 8.3 limit, and stores pointers in 32 bit records.

NTFS is the filesystem introduced for Windows NT and used in Windows XP and Vista.

I *think* if you right-click a drive and press properties, it should tell you what filesystem it uses. FAT32 is very prone to fragmentation. NTFS is supposed to be resistant, but I have seen fragmented NTFS filesystems (though usually not to the same extent as FAT).

Disk fragmentation is entirely caused by the way files are laid out on the drive by software.

[arigi.livejournal.com]

if it makes you feel any better i haven't defragged in 2 years.

[sen-ichi-rei.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's a really long time...

[superducky1.livejournal.com]

if you have a ton of contiguously free space on your hard drive, your computer doesn't have to break stuff into smaller, noncontiguous pieces to store it.

if you go to the disk defragmenter in windows and click "analyze" it will tell you if you need to defrag.