tolyanki

Yes, fragmentation is like a disease that cripples an otherwise healthy system. I'd like to think of it as Arthritis! Because no matter what superlative processers and other componenants one uses, the HDD being a mechanical device does tend to become the bottleneck in performance. Mushu:Yes, thats another scenario that fragmentation seems to affect.

You said it. Some of our systems would really crawl. Kids keep adding and deleting a lot of large files, downloading study materials which leaves the drives in a pretty bad shape. As for how much performance improvement, besides file access being noticeably faster than before a defrag, we seem to have lesser problems like freezing while running multiple applications. Since its a pain to monitor and defrag each system manually, we have installed one of the commercials tools to centrally manage the task. Thanks for all you replies guys! Guess its good to keep fragmentation at bay with just a few minutes spent regularly.

We have a network of systems at our school and have all the popular system maintenance programs installed on them. I recently came across an article on PC WORLD called 15 TechMyths which talks of deframentation not showing noticeable performance improvement. I find this hard to believe as our drives get fragmented pretty fast and we do notice problems like hangs and slowdown which are solved after CCleaner and defrag. I'd like to know viewpoints on this.