Defragging your hard drive is a good thing. The problem with windows in built defragging system is that it’s slow and ugly.
photo credit: dalechumbley
I said yesterday i could get vista to boot in 60 seconds. After i transferred all my music, pictures and programs back to my hard drive from an external drive, i had filled 110gb on my PC’s 500gb hard drive.
My PC was now taking 90 seconds to boot. I installed and ran my favourite defrag program – JKdefrag. It’s small, it’s light, it’s superfast… highly recommended. Simply by running it and letting it finish, boot time dropped another 10 seconds down to 80 seconds.
So it now takes me 80 seconds to start up vista and open up google – and that’s with all of my software and files installed back on to my computer. My PC now has razor sharp response times. There is no lag in firefox, no lag when playing music or choosing a different song… double click and it plays instantly.
Photoshop opens in exactly 6 seconds straight from start up… if i close it and open it again, it’ll open in 4 seconds.
The speed is fantastic… it’s like having a new PC. I’m getting in to the habit of defragging my hard drive any time i transfer files or download anything. That was my mistake up until now – rather than defrag as i go along, i’d defrag once in a blue moon which meant i was defragging 100gbs of stuff which would take an eternity using windows inbuilt defragging set up.
If you have ‘static’ files that are never going to be deleted or moved much – like program files or music / pictures, it’s important they’re all nicely compacted down and lumped together in a corner. That’s what defragging does. Because all of my music is in the same location, vista can access it quickly… in order… it knows where everything is. If i didn’t defrag, things would become messy and all over the place. They might look organised to me (to a human), but to vista, without defragging, it’s just a big mess.
Bottom line; if you want maximum performance, defrag your harddrive regularly.