[bcab] Re: Doing a Boot Time Defrag

Alexander said,
Hi Barry,
Hi Alexander,

1.  Thank you for all that info about drive speeds in RPM.  I am not
exactly certain how fast my drive actually is. as the Acer laptop has
been divided into c:\ and D:\ on the same drive, am I correct to see
them as partitions?

Yes, this is one hard drive split into two partitions.

Allot of laptop manufacturers are doing this these days.  The idea
behind it is that you use the D partition to store data like documents,
mp3s, etc.  Then if you have to restore back to factory defaults or
format the System drive, (almost always C), then you wont' lose your
work.

2.  I am running XP, but the format of the file system is Fat 32.  I
could get it changed to NTFS, but if I am correct, am I correct in
thinking that this would necessitate a complete reformat?

Nope, you wouldn't need to format your hard drive.

If you want to convert from Fat 32 to NTFS you can do the following,

NB.  You can not convert back to FAT32 without formatting the drive.

1.  Go to start.

2.  Hit R for run.

3.  Type, 
Cmd
And hit enter.

Type,

Convert c: /fs:ntfs

You'll hear/see allot of information about the file system.

Once it starts converting leave it to it as it might take a wee bit.



As to the state of the drives, I will have to run chkdsk, to check for
errors, but if I remember correctly, I have done this once and found
either no problems at all, or if there were some, they were few and
fixable.

When was the last tiem you ran chkdsk on the drive?

I'd recommend going to the command prompt as above and typing

C:
Cd\
Chkdsk /f /r
NB.  /f tells check disk to auto fix file errors, /r tells the drive to
check and recover bad sectors.

It will then ask you if you want to schedule the check the next time you
reboot the system, say yes.

3. I generally try to keep free space higher on D:\ than on c:\, but in
light of this thread, I will try and uninstall programs that I least
use.

I normally try and do some housekeeping like this myself, but providing
you've more than (debateable), 6gig free on the drive you should be
fine.

4.  As you will see, I have replied to your other post, although I will
take your advice and try downloading and running C Cleaner.

5.  I do not think I am having that much sluggishness in terms of time
taken to open files, and if I am having any, it relates to the fact that
I nearly always am running Supernova when I open other applications.

6.  I do not think that the system has been completely loaded from fresh
since I purchased it, and that was about 2 years ago.

You're more than likely grand.

Thank you for your very informative message.

You're welcome.  It's nice to be able sometimes to take the time and
reply properly.

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