Defragmenting

[mishalak]

&^%$ *&^% (*&^^
How does a 24 meg file get into 2018 fragments??? Even more annoyingly the standard deframenting program would not fix it. So I climbed into the guts of my computer, copied the file to another disc, defragmented again, then moved it back. It is still fragmented, but now only in 60 parts. And I discovered all sorts of ancient download cruff that was taking up space as well as being fragmented. I probably got back about 210 megs by deleting it.

I suspect the only way I could really improve on where my computer is now is to put in a bigger local hard disc, and I'm simply not going to do that. I only have to limp along with this machine for another year at most. I suppose I might also search for a program... but how much work do I want to put into this computer? It is ancient. As in I got this computer in 2002 and it was purchased in about 2001. Ancient. Antique almost.
 

Comments

[bovil.livejournal.com]

Depending on what OS you're running, either "cleanmgr.exe" or "mscleanmgr.exe" should help you find crap on your hard drive that you can get rid of. I would avoid the "compress old files" option, though.

You could get an external USB drive to transfer your data files to, and be prepared for when you get a new computer.

(ETA: cleanmgr just got rid of 2gb of crap on my machine, XP)

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Thanks, but these were temporary files created by Quicktime rather than the browser and apparently cleanmgr does not know how to deal with that. Plus even after using both explorer, Firefox, and cleanmgr to dump temporary internet files I'm still finding them. If I was going to try to keep this computer going longer I would strip off my files and then reinstall windows after a nice clean wipe. That's the only surefire way to deal with all the crap files left behind by every program.

I already use a external USB drive. Otherwise I would have been 58 gigs over already. It has copies of all my personal and critical files and would be the one thing I would grab if leaving during a fire.

[brett-dunbar.livejournal.com]

If you are using windows there is an easier method to defragment a single file. Go to the system internals website here (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx) and download contig which is on the file and disk utilities page. It is a small free command line tool developed by System Internals (now owned by microsoft) designed specifically for defragmenting individual files. There are rather a lot of useful programs there, Process Explorer (a very good task manager replacement) is probably the most useful.