My Life In Fragments (Well, His Anyway)

I don't have much of a clue about defragging. I go to My Computer and right click, choose Manage and analyze the hard drive for its fragmentary situation and it tells me if it's fine for the moment or needs to be defragged. Instantly. Cold sweats, sleepless nights, hallucinatory anxiety - all absent and correct. There's a part of me that doesn't believe that anything actually happens when you defrag - even more so with XP, which just seems to be thin lines marching across the screen - but it just serves as a graphic presentation of a placebo in action. All is calm; your computer will be fine now; the lines have marched; the fragging has been deed. Then another part of me believes that it is imperative to the smooth operation of my precious computer, and everything will grind to a dead halt unless the lines march and the little tiny cubey things change colour and force out the red ones. And who can find the time anyway, when defragging takes all day doing nothing except telling you that it hasn't done anything all day, and do you want it to do anything... It hasn't stopped me obsessing about defragging and trying to find better and more wonderful ways of getting it done. Here's what I have presently installed: SpeeDefrag 3.0 I love the idea of this teeny weeny download: You tell it what drive you want defragged, it turns the machine off and then back on again purely to defrag the relevant drive, and then shuts everything down. It worked fine for me. The problem seems to arise when it tries to handle machines with more than one profile. For a start, it renders the "let-it-get-on-with-it" factor useless because when it arrives at the welcome screen it halts and waits for someone to log-in and help it along. And then it just stops. Or worse. A friend of mine (in one of those awful situations where you highly recommend a piece of software...) loaded it up, lit the blue touchpaper and came home to a near meltdown. Lost explorer and goodness knows what else, and every time he rebooted the whole process started again because SpeeDefrag still believed it had a job to do - which, in this instance, was computer assassination. He did eventually manage to rollback to a restore point and all was peaceful and calm again - but it was a nail-shredding time. I don't have a work-around, I don't know what the solution is. I don't have multiple accounts, and it seems to have worked fine for me. So, I guess I'm saying Approach With Caution. Disk Idle Optimizer To quote: "Defrag your hard drive with your spare CPU cycles! Using the built in disk defragger in Windows XP (SP2 Required), this program senses when your computer is at an idle state and defrags your hard drive. As soon as you begin using your computer again, Disk Idle Optimizer will stop defragging, allowing you to use your PC to its fullest." Whether it's happening or not, I couldn't say, but it's there on my computer nonetheless. PageDefrag Sysinternals is one of those software companies that gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. A truckload of free tools that all do dark and mysterious things to keep your machine in top notch working order. I've got several installed and I don't think I know what one of them does. But I know they're there, and all is right with the world. This one kicks in during boot-up and does a mini defrag of something or other. And I'm glad it does. Contig Scary name. Short for "contiguous" which means "very close or connected in space or time; connected without a break; touching" and that's how I want my files to be. Yessiree. I wouldn't have the first clue how to use this - it is from those fine folks at Sysinternals, after all - if it wasn't for this front end: Power Defragmenter GUI This displays a choice of File, Folder, or Drive to defragment and then it launches Contig. Instead of marching lines or cubey things it tells you in words and numbers what files are in so many thousand fragments and where it is going to move them to. It's Sysinternals, so I believe them. And it seems to do a great job. So that's my umpteen lines of defragging defence; and I'm no nearer to knowing what it really means. Dark arts indeed.