Wanted to through this out here to see if the resident computer gurus have any ideas.
Okay, so the PC was running a little slow lately, so I checked the fragmentation status on it - turns out letting a hard drive go for five years without maintenance is a bad thing; who knew. Cleared out some space so it had the elbow room to run and let Windows' built-in Defragger go to work; for some reason it gets a quarter of the way in and decides to stop working. So I find another program called PerfectDisk that has a free trial, I dl that and tell it to do a defrag when I reboot the computer, restart, and off it goes. Progress is... slow.
That was yesterday at noon. I get back from work today, thirty hours later, and it's still not done. I figure, it's probably done enough; I mean, all that time wasn't spent doing nothing, was it? I only have a 40GB HD, after all. Start the computer all the way, and scan it again.
No change whatsoever in the frag status. All the files that were fractured before are just as much so now as when I started. Am I doing something wrong here (I mean, more more wrong than letting your five-year-old PC go without a decent defrag)?
Running Windows XP SP2 on a P4 2.4GHz with a 40GB Maxtor HD and 768MB of RAM. Everything's pretty much the way Dell put it together, just threw in more memory and upped the graphics card.
"...Dell..."
^ problem
Could someone explain to me why Dell computers are so looked down upon? That at least seems to be the case.
I am also looking for a good defragmentation program.
I could go for a good defragger, because from what I hear the Windows defragger is really really ineffective even when it does work.
Quote:
Could someone explain to me why Dell computers are so looked down upon? That at least seems to be the case.
Yes, I know, Dell = devil and all that. Next five rigs I get will be hand-constructed, promise.
I'm partial to O&O Defrag, and have been using 8.5 since October 06. Unless things have drastically changed since then, the first defrag you perform should be a COMPLETE/****, which will take about half as long as it would for Windows to do it. After that, stealth or space will do the job in a fraction of the time. You can also continue using your computer like nothing is happening.
Once the trial period is over you'll have to pay, use the ancient relic or go the eyepatch route, though. I also have no idea how 2k works or how 10 stacks up against the competition.
my parent's computer is running slow too for no reason, no idea if defragging it will make it work any faster.. it's never had a visable effect on it's performance in the past.
defragging = sloooooow~
Dell is looked down on because they are a packaged system manufacturer as opposed to a custom built shop, and ninety percent of their customer service centers are in India.
That said there are people, and lots of them, that are not gaming freaks and can't tell a AGP slot from a PCI-E. For these people the only choice is to pray the local custom shop doesn't rip them off too badly or buy a packaged system. And since generally packaged systems are half the price? Well there you go.
As far as packaged systems go, I would have to give DELL my commendation for least @#%$ major company.
~Tobe
As much as I enjoy the Dell hate/love fest...
Any thoughts as to how I can fix things here?
Like I NOTED. Like they said, don't use windows defrag, use a third party one.
~Tobe
Like I said, did that.
I think I'm missing it, didn't see where you said you tried the O&O defrag. /shrug
If that didn't work then your issue probably isn't related to fragmented files. Probably malware of some nature.
First post I said I dl'd PerfectDisk; haven't bothered with O&O, but if you think it'll help.
I've been running Adaware, Spybot S&D, and Norton Antivirus (albeit with outdated definitions) on my system for years now, it always comes up clean.
Try O&O.
Norton is usually more trouble than help on home PC's. Use AVG or PcCillin.
Aside from O&O, have you run Spybot in safemode?
~Tobe
Okay, progress report on running O&O:
Primary analysis placed defrag status somewhere around 85%. When I started it up, it reported it would take two and a half hours; when I checked back in twenty minutes, though, it said 14 hours.
When I came home from work 9-10 hours later it said 12. Again, am I doing something wrong here or is my hard drive just that messed up?
Possibly, I'm not familiar with the defragmentation program though. I'd actually advise a reformat if the drive IS indeed that bad. Obviously little to no maintenance in was done in that area on this drive so it could really be that bad. I know I generally don't defrag, I just format. Why? Because I like a clean drive. /shrug
EDIT: 85%? Holy @#%$. I've never defragged this rig and it's only at 20% Yeah, yours is pretty borked.
~Tobe
Anyway. Final update. I've had to restart O&O maybe, oh, two dozen times over the past week because it keeps stopping, which has led me to the conclusion that my hard drive is, indeed, completely borked. I'll have to see about replacing it or reformatting later.
Thanks for your helps, everyone.
