Ferentix
It's not a me!
OK, this is a rather bad situation here. This here computer is the family computer, which we've now had for maybe 2 years. It's a pretty good middle range general-purpose home PC (better since I installed a graphics card to replace the onboard S3 prosavage video). However, please bear with me here- it hasn't had it's hard drive defragmented EVER in the time we've had it. Yes, I knew it should be done regularly, and that was a dumb thing to do. OK, so we have the standard Windows gradual performance decay that most people mention. Every time my dad boots it up he tends to rant about how slow it is to boot and so forth, which gets rather annoying 
And of course, it hacks me off too- it really does take a lot longer, and also once you're in it's all slower too. So I went looking for defrag utilities, finding one called "Perfectdisk", which was recommended by several members of another forum as being generally faster and more reliable than the one that ships with XP. So I checked it out.
The HD is ~80Gb, so I'd expect it to take several hours maybe. Add a few more due to the huge period of neglect. Maybe it would even take half a day, 12 hours, maybe a day even. I was prepared for that. However, I left it on for 6 hours, and it hadn't even got up to 1% completion (!). By some hazy calculation, I figure it would take, at this rate (assuming it's constant of course) several WEEKS to finish.
So basically, what I'm looking for is something that defragments faster. I'm thinking the best way would be some sort of bootdisk containing a very lightweight OS and a defragmentation program, which fits on a floppy, probably Linux or FreeDOS or similar. However, I'm not sure If I can just use any defrag software- might it have to be aware of anything specific to WinXP, so I don't boot back to XP to find it's been FUBAR'd? Like which areas of the drive to leave untouched. I figure a bootdisk is the way to go though, because it'll mean that the software will be able to use pretty much all the processing power and memory available, which would otherwise be partially taken by background programs.
So can anyone point me to a suitable bootdisk or other software to try to cut this down to a sensible period of time?
Please, any help is VERY appreciated (Uh... and sorry for the essay length post :blink: )
And of course, it hacks me off too- it really does take a lot longer, and also once you're in it's all slower too. So I went looking for defrag utilities, finding one called "Perfectdisk", which was recommended by several members of another forum as being generally faster and more reliable than the one that ships with XP. So I checked it out. The HD is ~80Gb, so I'd expect it to take several hours maybe. Add a few more due to the huge period of neglect. Maybe it would even take half a day, 12 hours, maybe a day even. I was prepared for that. However, I left it on for 6 hours, and it hadn't even got up to 1% completion (!). By some hazy calculation, I figure it would take, at this rate (assuming it's constant of course) several WEEKS to finish.
So basically, what I'm looking for is something that defragments faster. I'm thinking the best way would be some sort of bootdisk containing a very lightweight OS and a defragmentation program, which fits on a floppy, probably Linux or FreeDOS or similar. However, I'm not sure If I can just use any defrag software- might it have to be aware of anything specific to WinXP, so I don't boot back to XP to find it's been FUBAR'd? Like which areas of the drive to leave untouched. I figure a bootdisk is the way to go though, because it'll mean that the software will be able to use pretty much all the processing power and memory available, which would otherwise be partially taken by background programs.
So can anyone point me to a suitable bootdisk or other software to try to cut this down to a sensible period of time?
Please, any help is VERY appreciated
(Uh... and sorry for the essay length post :blink: )
