I know some people who swore by Disk Defragmenting.
But basically I was wondering if the result (a more responsive computer) is worth the effort (running defragmenter – in a 2GB ram environment that means while i'm running defragmenter i am suffering from a less responsive computer symptom)
Or is it like in order to "maximize" the rate of return of the effort of defragmenting I should do defragmentation like once every X months?
(32 bit Windows Vista Home premium sp2)
Best Answer
I manage about 25 computers in a small office, most of which had been WinXP (which came with no default defrag task scheduled). I wasn't very consistent in managing these machines, so some of them I had scheduled weekly runs of defrag (current favorite is Piriform Defraggler) and others I had not.
Over the last two years I have definitely seen the horrible performance problems that can be caused by not performing a regular defrag. Many of the machines that had run for 2-4 years were being used only for web browsing and light MS Office use, but were 25%-35% fragmented, with even small files having sometimes thousands of fragments. The daily users of these computers knew their computers were frustrating to use, but weren't vocal about it. Only when someone else would sit at their computers and simply try to open Excel or a web browser would they comment "man, this computer SUCKS."
I really like Defraggler because you can easily choose individual files to defrag if you need to.