fogster

I just ran it earlier, hence my question. Nothing else running, fresh after a virus scan. She's "only" got a gig of RAM and a 2.6 (?) GHz processor, but nothing else was running. (Aside from the usual background processes.) Huh, this could be it... She runs Norton, which does seem to enjoy taking control of everything going on. Are there known issues with CCleaner and Norton? I can't imagine it would slow things down that much, especially when it's just I/O reads, not file manipulation. (Referring to the 'analyze'/'scan' bit.) No no, it's run on demand, typically by me. Definitely not at startup, and definitely not when a million other things are trying to use the disk.

I'm just curious what the 'average' time is for people... On my machine (~30GB disk used, slow 5400 RPM), it takes no more than 30 seconds to 'analyze' the system in CCleaner. On my mom's laptop, it takes a good 10 minutes. (No, no viruses, and the drive gets defragged routinely. ~20GB disk usage.) I'm just wondering which system is closer to the norm, and if anyone has any recommendations for what could be slowing things down so much on the second computer?

If the hard drive doesn't show up at all, all I can imagine is that the 'stress' on the disk (caused by moving files all over the place to defrag it) caused your hard disk to fail, or that the problem was unrelated to Defraggler and merely coincidental. If Diskeeper had corrupted files, you should still be able to see the hard disk. That error indicates is about your network card, indicating that its "media" (e.g., network cable) isn't plugged in. The PXE refers to network boot -- it's basically saying it can't boot off the network because you're not plugged into the network. It really doesn't pertain to your hard drive at all, aside from the fact that you maybe wouldn't be seeing it if your hard drive worked. Looks like this is a laptop, so I would encourage you to not do anything unless you find good directions online. The only "reseating" that's necessary, really, is making sure it's plugged in securely. I haven't worked with the laptop line you're using, but I've never seen a laptop where the hard disk could come loose unless you dropped it down the stairs or something.

That's an accurate summary. The one thing I'd caution is that defragging shouldn't massively decrease the life of a solid-state drive, just that it's taking a few out of something finite. (It drives me batty to see people afraid to update things on solid-state for fear of using up a write cycle. You've got plenty, there's just no reason to waste them defragging.) Diskeeper -- probably just price. Until I switched to Vista (where my existing license no longer works), I was in love with Diskeeper. It works amazingly well. The downside is the obvious one you point out -- cost. Windows Defrag is basically as bad as defragging gets. Defraggler seems a lot faster to me, for one. Plus it allows defragging individual files/folders if you want, and theoretically (I maintain that it still doesn't work, though others have disagreed) allows defragging "free space" to reduce future fragmentation.

I don't profess to be an expert, but I would say that there is next to no benefit to defragging a flash drive. As a solid-state device, it has near-instant seek times: with spinning disks, it takes a lot of time to access data spread out over the disk. With solid-state technology, there's no real overhead in doing that: a file in 1,000 fragments is pretty much as quick as a contiguous file. (To get real nitpicky, solid-state disks have a finite number of writes that can be performed, so you could argue that you're wearing it out quicker. But the number is generally something large, and I've never heard of a flash drive going bad, to be honest. It'd be like arguing that walking out to the mailbox unnecessarily wore down your shoes: it's accurate, but it's a minuscule difference.) So I would argue that there's no benefit to defragging flash drives. (All this said, I have terrible OCD and have done it just so everything looks good. Absolutely no performance gain for me, but it made me feel good.)

Yes, yes, yes! Posting from a 60GB drive with 50+ GB used, but an almost-empty 500GB USB drive attached.

Do you mean "Defrag Freespace" (in the Advanced menu)? If so, I'm noticing the same thing! I have a relatively fresh Vista install and downloaded Defraggler yesterday. For some reason (even before Defraggler), files were pretty much evenly distributed across my hard drive. Since there is no one, big block of free space, any large files are guaranteed to be badly fragmented. It makes no difference whether I do the "Allow Fragmentation" one or not. (Though I'm not quite sure what 'defragging free space, allowing fragmentation' means? Is the alternative to abort if it can't do it 100%?) Based on yamakawa's comments, it sounds as if this may have been broken in the latest releases? (Though I see that a build was released today; I'll try that one.) The ability to try to free up a lot of contiguous disk space would be very helpful for people like me. (And yes, I know that cramming every file right next to the next would leave no room for files to be expanded... But leaving them spread all over the disk is no good, either!) It sounds more like yamakawa was reporting a bug/problem, to be honest. The linked thread doesn't help me at all.