Originally Posted by Gertrude the Wombat
What for?
What evidence do you have that:
(a) fragmentation is giving you some sort of problem, and:
(b) defragmenting is going to fix it?
In particular, what will you measure, before and after, in order to confirm that what you did was useful?
If the answer to all these questions is "don't know" or "some bloke I met in a pub told me to do this" or "I read it on a web site so it must be true" then I suggest you spend the time doing something more interesting instead.
Gertrude,
To answer your questions...
I've done a check of the current fragmentation on the disk, which is pretty major... I looked at the figures.
My XP talks German, so I can't give you the exact quotes (I can MP them, if that helps you for some more advice).
I've done regular defragmentation on older versions of Windows, so I know the "before and after".
Freeing up some swap space to somewhat over the limit, which I've done today, has slightly improved matters, but most applications and file accesses still rattle the HD far too much, which means they're still looking all over the place for the data, which is what a full defrag would certainly improve.
So I would "measure" it by less HD rattle, faster file access, and suchlike.
As to doing something more interesting...
Yes, once I've got some money coming in, I'll get the CD-R installed, see if I can get the dud external HD installed inside, get an USB 2.0 card, get more RAM, and so on and so forth.
Until then, I'm just trying to get a bit more joy out of my current heap.
Thanks for trying to help in your way. As I said already, I'm an oldie, so fairly familiar with what's going on, and not relying on a friend at the pub. As a matter of fact, some of the replies on here have already been useful, and I hope for some more.
I still regret my old Win3.11 machine. 100MHz Pentium, 1Gb hard disk with two entirely separate 500Mb partitions. Far faster than any of the current ****, both for start-up and for loading applications and files. Sadly, there was no way to get a broadband modem with a Win3.11 driver, so I had to upgrade... what do I say...
downgrade ... to the next generation.
CJ