defragging a disk could make a huge difference

A customer had two ACT Sirius machines, with whopping great 10MB HDs, to run Autodesk CAD. They weren't really our responsibility to support but they were complaining that saving files was becoming a huge issue, up to 20+ minutes for some designs, so I had a quick look.

Inevitably, with a small disk, low memory and an application that spewed out temporary files, the disks were so heavily fragmented it was a miracle anything ran at all. I ran defrag on both machines, ran a few more basic checks, advised the customer that removing a few older files and repeating the defrag monthly, or so, would help, and left a happy customer who could now save files in under a minute.

Reminds me of the reason I installed Windows NT 4.0 on our home machine. My wife tended to clean up things on disk, which is commendable in itself, but removing autoexec.bat, command.com, or config.sys can be unhelpful. After I installed NT 4.0 and didn't give her admin rights, things somehow ran much more smoothly. She was a bit ticked off at having to log in, but at least the thing would boot up properly.

Similar one for me: When doing 2nd line support 20-odd years ago I had to work with someone who had somehow blagged their position presumably by outright lying and never having been asked any actual technical questions in her interview. One day she's trying to remotely sort out a client's PC running XP when she puts them on hold and asks everyone across our bank of desks, "Is it ok if I delete pagefile.sys on their machine? It's taking up a lot of space." Cue everyone stopping what they are doing and looking up at her, then looking at each other, speechless.

Dial-up internet access would fail a few times a year, necessitating a 360 mile round trip to fix it. Usual cause was dad changing settings "because".

Machine was already running NT4, and removing admin rights from his account meant it ran much better.

MS-Dos was normally such a pita with its switch syntax that I would have thought if defrag didn't detect at least something resembling a FAT file system it would have chickened out.

I have seen a system V/386 file system trashed when the PC was booted off a DOS floppy and said file system "fixed." Sorry fsck isn't now going return your data... all gone to the great archive in the sky.

Fortunately in those days almost all Unix machine ran on proprietary hardware (non intel x86) even if the CPUs (eg M680x0) weren't so this was a one off cockup and very sobering lesson for the (ir)responsible party.

yes partly because disks are faster but mostly because 99% of PCs don't use disks nowadays

@Tim 11

"yes partly because disks are faster but mostly because 99% of PCs don't use disks nowadays"

Plenty of us still running old machines (multiple in my case) with spinning rust disks rather than SSD.

It will be a while before SSD really do have 99% of the market of PCs that are still in use.

I'm sure someone can hunt some stats but I'm guessing even with current PCs that less than 99% ship with SSDs as OEMS do like to keep cheap / budget PC lines (keeping old designs and older technology chugging along) for the likes of PC World etc to flog to unsuspecting punters (most who will be blissfully aware that the "cost saving" they make buying such machines is only one metric and not factoring in the far better performance available for a slightly higher price)

I don't know about you, but pretty much all of my systems, even the older ones, now have SSDs for at least their boot disk. And I'm even talking about some systems with IDE disks.

The only thing that is running spinning rust is my IBM pSeries (because SAS SSDs are still expensive), and my NAS box.

> The only thing that is running spinning rust is my IBM pSeries (because SAS SSDs are still expensive), and my NAS box.

The same here for the NAS, although it's getting to the point that I could afford to run SSDs now. If Synology made a NAS I wanted to buy (ie one that can do both 10Gb/s and video transcoding) then I'd probably take the plunge.

My last spinning rust drive - either in home or office - is my aging PS4. But even so, 99% is a very large number and plenty of folk still use older machines, so I doubt it's quite that high.

It doesn't seem to be a thing that the Steam hardware survey covers, not sure if anyone else is tracking these numbers, though.

..and the SSD manufacturers tell you not to defrag. SSDs, because it can shorten their lives significantly.

I've always hated getting disks to boot, specially in win2k / xp /98 days

Some times they'll stop with some message like mbr not found , and then you're screwed , in spite of a perfectly good copy of windows on the disk its a reinstall , just to make the disk bootable again .

yes there were some incantations like "fixmbr" or other stuff , but making a disc bootable seems massivley over complicated and has only got worse .

It wasnt too bad pre windows when format /s would do it , but again - that involved a format .

This days with this UIEFI thing , the OS and firmware are horribly tied together in ways i'm not gonna try to start understanding . Too old and not in that role now.

I''ve a linux machine that nearly had to be binned becuase of some "secure boot" shit that I never asked for.

I uefi/bios upgrade on my home machine resulted in non booting c drive just last week for some goddam reason Bitlocker was mentioned in various warnings/errors .

Again , never asked for that to be installed , and it seems like it wasnt - or it was but hadnt actually encrypted anything as the data was clearly visible

JUST NOT BOOTABLE ! AGAIN!

cue windows reinstall and loss of license key. (I knew the key , but seesm microsoft didnt fancy honouring it anymore)

Also this whole process seemed to finish off a 2tb backup drive , which tbf had shown errors previously but after this debacle was not retrievable with or without data .

/rant

"Some times they'll stop with some message like mbr not found , and then you're screwed , in spite of a perfectly good copy of windows on the disk its a reinstall , just to make the disk bootable again ."

Or FDISK /mbr to rebuild it, from a bootable disk.

You'd think defrag.exe would say "Hang on , this aint FAT , dont know what to do with it" rather than happily start munching away at a file system its not written for . What did it think it was doing ?

If you hired a German translator and it turns out you needed a French translator he's not gonna just start guessing and writing random English words - you'd get an error message.

It's probably built to be fast, so it's going to do something like grabbing 4 bytes, treat the first three as an identifier and the fourth as a length, tag that length in bytes as that first identifier then jumping [length] bytes ahead, grabbing four bytes to get ID and lengths, jumping [length], etc, etc.

(I actually got myself into a similar mess a few years back, trying to write a world editor for Minecraft)

It's not until someone calls you up and says "your defragger ate my drive" you realise you've fucked up. Or maybe you always knew it only worked on FAT, asked the boss if there was time to add a test and they said to just put "only for FAT" in sharpie on the floppy disk and ship it.

You'd think defrag.exe would say "Hang on , this aint FAT , dont know what to do with it"

Take a deep breath, stand back and realise this is Microsoft we're talking about. Microsoft with the Microsoft world view: "Everything is assumed to be ours.". Yes, NT was NTFS was also Microsoft's but defrag.exe was written before that existed. In the view of its authors, therefore, all disks were FAT and there was no point in even thinking they might not be, let alone testing for it.

I remember when I first left school. Doing Tech support.. I always had my box of utility floppies, including dodgy copies of both Norton Utilities (when it for was good), Norton Commander, Xtree, Sidekick and Central Point software's PC tools, and whatever other tools I could cobble up. Using that little lot, I could usually have a good go at fixing whatever problems I encountered, and even though they were illegal, Viruses weren't really a thing at the time. When they did become a thing, I just added a copy of Dr Solomon's Antivirus.

That box has long since gone, to be replaced by an external SSD containing legit copies of the software I use to fix problems.. Usually freeware or open source, but in a few cases, I have purchased licences, or been given them by my employer. My SSD is in an external case (an iodd st400) that offers the cool facility to emulate CD/DVD/Blu Rays. I know that Windows, and pretty much every other modern OS, can mount ISOs directly, but because the emulation is done by the drive itself, and appears to the host system as a USB CD drive, it's useful for booting OS ISOs, as it works in the machine's firmware.