Defrag??

[Arnold]

How often do you suggest to defrag a hd?? Is once a week too often, and is there wear to the drive?

[grandslammer]

One thing about defrag, do you have your swap file fixed, or is windoze managing it? By specifying a size, (minimmum and maximum same size), windud doesn't constantly resize it, causing fragmentation.

Just for starters, you might try setting it to 2.5 times your ram, ie: 32mb ram, 80mb min, 80mb max swap file. 64mb ram, 160mb min, 160mb max, etc...

If you're not familiar with this, RIGHT click on My Computer,properties, performance, virtual memory. Click on "let me specify my own settings." Enter the appropriate values in the two fields, and click on Okay, then Okay.

Badda boom, badda bing!

If you already knew this, then I appologize. If not, then give it a try!

At my home, any given hour of the day there is someone on the comp, usually on the 'net. We probably defrag at least every 3 or 4 days. That is work on your HD, but if you think about it, searching all over a fragmented drive puts extra load on your HD too...

Obviously it's your choice, but that's my input.

Good luck in all...

Mike P.

[Nathan]

Everytime you access the hard drive, you have wear on it. However, if you don't defrag your hard drive on a regular basis, you add more wear and tear because the computer will take longer to find the file(s) it's looking for.

Sometimes I defrag my hard drive 3 times a week, right after I dump my temp files. It takes about 17 minutes to defrag about 3 GB of actual files. At least once a week for sure unless I'm out of town.

[stu]

I reckon I defrag on average twice a week.

if u are going to set fixed swap file I would recommend running ur most intensive apps or games like UNREAL and using sytem monitor or Norton to check the maximum size swap file ur system uses then add about 30 megs for safety.

I have 256 MB Ram and a fixed swap file of 200 MB is quite sufficient. Running UNREAL uses 190 MB RAM and 150 MB swap file.