However...Quitting and re booting resulted in time to load of only 3 mins 53. Repeating the test produced times of 2 mins 55 and 2 min 56.
My pre defrag time of 3 mins 53 wasn't the first of the day, so the defrag has probably reduced startup times. Without timing, I've previously thought the first start of the day seemed to take longer. These figures seem to prove it. I'm still using SP1, so conditiond are pretty much the same. So, any theories on why the first start takes so much longer, as if on exiting FSX, some parts remain in memory.
Gerry Winskill Gerry Winskill wrote:
Before defrag, time to load = 3 mins 53 After defrag, time to load = 5 mins 40 ?????????????????????????????? Gerry Winskill Gerry Winskill wrote:Thanks Paul, that's clearer.Having done the Horizon drive I'm now doing the FSX bearing C drive. I'm following the instructions to get the FSX files right at the beginning, then to have them undisturbed by future defrags. Or summat!Gerry Winskill Paul Reynolds wrote:Off topic I suppose but should put your mind at rest. I apologise in advance if I'm teaching Granny about egg sucking...In most cases stopping and restarting a defrag should have no adverse effect on the system. The purpose of defrag. is to store files without them beingscattered in small blocks or fragments of data across the disk, and preferably files that would be used together, stored together. The ideabeing the less the drive heads have to move to read the data, the quickerthe read from disk.However, when we adjust our systems we often change files that would havebeen stored in one place so they get scattered. What's worse is when we install a file the system will naturally try towrite it to the first available space on the disk, if it can't put all the file in the space available then it will move on to the next available space and continue there which is how we get file fragmentation. As it does the same with temporary files, you can see how easily it is for the system to get choked up with fragmented files and the more fragmentation there is, the more your drive heads have to jump about alll over the place to read dataand consequently slowing your machine down.When you defrag., what you are doing is re-uniting all the scattered bits of files so they are in one contiguous place: Starting at the beginning of the disk, it will find all the fragmented parts of a file and copy them to empty space, usually at the end of the disk. It will then do the same for anyother files it needs to move to create a space big enough to write the fragmented file back at the beginning of the disk but as one continuousfile. It will keep doing this until all the files have been trated the sameway.If it's possible to without causing an issue, I start it defragging over night, stop it when you need to use the machine then re-commence when notneeded until the job is complete. I would then schedule an over-nightdefrag. Once a week if you can. This weekly defrag. shouldn't be too bad since it'll only have one weeks mayhem to tidy up after, the majority of thefiles should be OK.I use a programme called O&O defrag. which has a stealth mode,if it findsexcessive fragmentation, it will defrag in background. This I findextremely useful and allows me to not worry about defrag. Though I should add that I fell foul of it not long ago as it was active when I did a hard reset and that's how I corrupted my C drive. Having said that, I've beenrunning it several years without a problem otherwise. Hope that helps, Paul -----Original Message-----From: jhb-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:jhb-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On BehalfOf Peter Dodds Sent: 02 January 2008 18:20 To: jhb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Cc: pdodds@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: [jhb] Re: DefragI've always assumed that if I stop it prematurely (which is quite safe by the way) it would start all over again when I restart it. I had a laptop once that always restarted a defrag every 10 minutes or so because "new data has been written to disk". I never found out what caused it and I neverdefragged that drive! (because I couldn't). Peter