How often should you de-frag?

[Taffy]

I'm not sure where to put this, so I thought i'd put it in the place where you post things that ytou don't know where to post: The Chat Box.

Back on topic, i'm sitting here, wondering whether or not to bother de-fragging my computer. It's got a fair old whack of free memory left, plus I remove old programs as soon as I stop using them. But it's still steadily slowing down.

Is a de-frag the answer? Or should I not bother with the hassle?

 

[T-Bone]

I do it every three weeks, which may be a tad on the extreme side but it keeps me ticking over nicely. Maybe every 6 weeks is normal to keep peak performance.

 

[PsiSoldier]

SATA HDDs dont need to be de-fraged as much as FAT32, so depending what HDD it is, determines how ofter to de-frag

 

[Ronin Storm]

I do it every three weeks

Yeah, I go for a defrag every three to five weeks and that seems to do well for me.

One of the other key factors is free disk space, when using the basic MS tools. In fact, for optimal performance, one should endeavour to keep around a third of one's drive free at all times, for fastest writes.

 

[Gopha]

I do it Once a month

 

[thatbloke]

In addition to doing it every 4 weeks, I would also recommend that you use a defragger other than the basic windows one. The windows one does not do much, if anything in my experience.

Take a look at Diskeeper. I use it, (though the latest version is version 10, and I only have version 8) with no problems. And it works alot better than the basic windows one. Why? because the windows one leaves a whole load of files it considers may be "sensitive" alone so as to reduce the risk of damaging them. Diskeeper says "bollox to that, I'm moving these" and moves them.

It shows you in a nice graphical way the state of your drives too... and gives you a report and a recommendation on whether you need to defrag. It has an option where it can work constantly in the background, however I don't use it... I feel that it will degrade performance too much (though I haven't tried it).

It's also not free, however, but a trial version exists.

 

[Haven]

You should defrag as often as your drives fragment. In other words find some nice software that runs as a daemon and automatically defrags once your system reaches a pre-defined level. Its just one more thing that you can easily automate so that you never need think about it again.

 

[Birdy]

im now at the stage where im not sure my computer sould cope with being de-fragmented!! this past week has shown me its about to die and i dont know if its a processor or space issue!

 

[Pestcontrol]

PsiSoldier: Sata is an interface protocol, fat32 a filesystem. What you mean is NTFS which basically means XP gets less fragmented than windows 98 does. It still needs defragging though.

I usually defrag after a fresh install once all the software and drivers are on, i may also defrag after installing large games or doing a lot of large file operations. Other than that, once every three or four months maybe.

The thing with fragmentation is, it's not that bad unless you get too much of it. It's also very important that you keep at least 10% space free, as fragmentation occurs faster when there is less free space available.

Haven: Is there any free software you can recommend for doing this on Windows XP?