Evo
29th Jul 2004, 11:26
I've been called in to fix up a relative's XP/Home PC, which is reasonably modern but has recently started to run very slowly. The machine was clean (Windows Update, NAV and SpyBot all up to date so that lecture must have worked ;) ), but starting anything up led to long waits and lots of disk activity.
I think the problem is the fairly small hard disk (14 gigs), which was almost full (about 200Mb free) and heavily fragmented, with XP's defragger almost completely red - I guess the OS has been squeezing files in where it can find space for a while, and now everything is badly mixed together. There's also a fair bit of swapping going on, as the machine has only got 128Mb installed, and I guess the page file is also heavily fragmented. Sounds like a resonable reason for slowdown? I know more memory would help, but it's not just a lack of memory problem, performance has been fine for their needs until now. Apart from fragmentation I can't find anything else wrong with it...
Now I know defraggers are useless without some space to play with, so I spent some time cleaning up and now there's about 5 Gig free, a bit over a third of the disk. Still, the XP defragger seems completely unable to do anything about the file fragmentation - it has a half-hearted attempt to clean up, but when it finishes the disk is still all red. Now, the disk is formatted NTFS and I remember in the days of NT4 that the hard disk could get so fragmented that Windows couldn't fix it. Two versions of Windows later, has anything changed? Or is the defragger still basically useless?
Sorry, a rather long post for a very simple question :O
I think the problem is the fairly small hard disk (14 gigs), which was almost full (about 200Mb free) and heavily fragmented, with XP's defragger almost completely red - I guess the OS has been squeezing files in where it can find space for a while, and now everything is badly mixed together. There's also a fair bit of swapping going on, as the machine has only got 128Mb installed, and I guess the page file is also heavily fragmented. Sounds like a resonable reason for slowdown? I know more memory would help, but it's not just a lack of memory problem, performance has been fine for their needs until now. Apart from fragmentation I can't find anything else wrong with it...
Now I know defraggers are useless without some space to play with, so I spent some time cleaning up and now there's about 5 Gig free, a bit over a third of the disk. Still, the XP defragger seems completely unable to do anything about the file fragmentation - it has a half-hearted attempt to clean up, but when it finishes the disk is still all red. Now, the disk is formatted NTFS and I remember in the days of NT4 that the hard disk could get so fragmented that Windows couldn't fix it. Two versions of Windows later, has anything changed? Or is the defragger still basically useless?
Sorry, a rather long post for a very simple question :O