So far as the defragging goes, I'm absolutely convinced that it's effective in the case of this installation. Well before midweek, each week, the laptop is going so slowly that it would drive me nuts. From button press to an open Chrome (she insists upon Chrome
) takes more than five minutes but around one minute and 30 seconds after the cleanup. CrapCleaner for several years took between 5 and 15 GB of rubbish out of the HDD every week but over the past year it has gradually crept down to around 100 to 200 MB a week even though Madam's pattern of work remains similar so I think it's likely that, proportionally, CrapCleaner bears a lesser responsibility for the weekly improvement recently. This summer I was away for about 12 days and missed two consecutive weekly cleans and the machine essentially stopped. Apparently it had posted repeated warnings that the HDD had so little free space that the next desired application might just not work. When I got back the defrag took almost 24 hours and I had to run it twice consecutively to get the free space back from under 4 GB (unreliable but is as I seem to remember it) to 36 GB. Unfortunately, with all of my own catching up to do I didn't take a note of the number of files and fragments at the start of the process. Two years ago the start position was typically 20 GB free space out of 111 GB, 15,000 fragmented files with 80,000 fragments. For some reason now it usually starts with around the same amount of free space but the fragmented file count is usually around 2,000 and the number of fragments at about 7,000. I don't know what the reason is for the reduction because the time taken to do the clean up and the free space recovered each time remains about the same, so does the change in performance. Defraggler usually stops with fewer than four fragmented files and under ten fragments remaining and quite often achieves zero of each. The free space is only recovered towards the very end of the process so stopping it early (and I'm often tempted!) doesn't achieve that. Using the "Quick Defrag" fails to recover the free space at all and so it often stops with less than 10 GB free.
I'd love to be able to avoid it all but the machine essentially died when it was left undone for only the two Wednesdays in a row so I don't see that I have any choice. I emphasise again that the computer is very revived each week by doing it. It never reaches a gallop but does a fair imitation of a trot!
Respectfully, I don't think I have any option other than to find a defragmenter and a backup program equally efficient and simple to use but hopefully quicker.