Something Interesting about SP Upgrades

"Seth Renigar" a écrit dans le message de news: GvyUf.80776$ snipped-for-privacy@tornado.southeast.rr.com...

That post reminded me that I installed Diskeeper 8 months ago, with the appropriate "set and forget". Just checked: all my disks where almost totaly blue. I feel I have to recommend it. There must a demo to downld. HIH JM

That is what I am using as well, er, well the demo at least. Works good, except that you can't do the "set and forget" feature with the demo. That would have saved me several steps in my obsessive compulsive upgrade procedure. Maybe one day I will actually buy it.

If the disk is nearly full, any new files will have to be stuffed in between all those unfragmented files, resulting in a zillion fragments. That's just the way Windows does things. Even worse, a SP is going to replace a zillion files with files of slightly different sizes. They won't fit in the old holes, so they get fragmented. Nothing special going on here, just file system operations. Let your nightly defrag worry about it.

I agree. But on my 80GB drive, only 20GB is used. Hardly full... I've just never noticed such a major fragmentation on an upgrade, that's all.

Also, I don't have a nightly defrag setup. Can't do it with the demo of DiskKeeper that I have. And I never could get it to work when I used the built-in defrag utility. So I just try to remember to do it every few days. No biggie...

And I never could get it to work when I

Ok. Yeah, that is a bit odd that Windows would fragment everything, when there's 60 GB free.

I think you hit the mark in the second part of your response. SW is replacing files, lots of files. Does Windows say, "Oh the user is replacing the file with a bigger file so move the pointer to a contiguous block on the disk so it won't be fragmented." No, Windows is going to keep the pointer to the start of the file (with the same path/name) and just keep allocating to the tail of the file's allocated blocks till space is no longer needed. There is no rocket science to this and Linux or a MAC would do the same thing. So after upgrading do another defrag.

I use dirms for defragging. Seems to do a bit better than diskkeeper.

TOP,

After thinking about what you just said (or rather the way you said what Dale said), it makes plenty of sense. But I've still never noticed such a huge fragmentation after an upgrade before.

I wasn't trying to make an issue out of this. It was just something I noticed. It is not a big deal at all...

Alright, now it IS a big deal! What in the heck is going on here?!?! I just got into work this morning and my computer had a DiskKeeper message on the screen that said something to the effect of "Your system has become badly fragmented in the past 2 days. There are 4113 excess fragments. You should defrag now." Man this is a rather large number of fragments.

I defragged after the SW SP update yesterday, and went about a normal working day. I did nothing out of the norm to cause these excessive fragments. Its like it just decided to fragment itself overnight.

Instead of just an observation like yesterday, now I ask a question. Does anyone know what might be happening here?!?!

do you happen to have MS tweak UI power toy installed? there is an option to have XP defrag in the background which may be somewhat different to Diskkeepers ideas about it.

No. I've heard of it. But don't know a lot about it.

Where do you get the MS tweak UI power toy? Is it free?

yes free from MS see this page on right half way down

I was using Norton Systemworks to defrag at one stage and couldn't understand why it seemed to get undone a while afterward. turned out I had the Tweak option set for XP to defrag in the background and the defrag routines are different so it always looked in need of a defrag to the other...not your problem in this case though since it is not installed :o)

Cool! Thanks. I'll give this a try.

Hello All,

Do yourselves a favor and buy the full version of Diskeeper. Once it's configured for SET IT & FORGET IT, defragmentation will happen automatically in the background. Also, with the full version, you aren't limited to defragging only one drive at a time. In addition Boot Runtime defragmenting can be done in order to act on the many system files which can't be moved while Windows is running...

I found it difficult (and a nuisance) to remember to conduct frequent manual defrags, especially for multiple drives and partitions. The built-in Windows utility tends to report NO need for defragmentation, even when there are many fragmented files, takes much longer to run as compared to Diskeeper and is limited to one drive at a time.

The only thing to watch for with Diskeeper (after upgrading from one version to another) is to make sure SET IT & FORGET IT is still active.

I've used Diskeeper for years and wouldn't be without it!

Per O. Hoel ________________ Seth Renigar wrote: