System Tweaking Guide - Defrag - By Mark "Frugal" Bush
Defrag is a utility
that defragments your hard drive. Before we look at defragging
the hard drive lets discuss what fragmentation is and how it happens
to your hard drive. When you first fdisk, format, and install
Windows all the files are stored on you hard drive in one tidy
contiginous block (in otherwords all your files are together).
Over time as you install and uninstall stuff and delete files
you end up with little spaces left in that block where the files
you deleted used to be. The following image is a section of a
drive in this condition.
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When you install more stuff or write files to the drive Windows
will use these spaces first. Large files may have to fit into
these smaller spaces left by many smaller files. In this case
Windows will break up the larger files into small enough chunks
to fit into these spaces. This can result in a file being broken
up and spread all over the hard drive. This situation where large
files are broken up and stored in several smaller spaces rather
than written as a single block is known as fragmentation.
When your drive is fragmented, there are several side effects
and they are all bad. First, the read and write heads of your
hard drive must travel further and thus must work harder. This
results in the drive taking longer to both store and retrieve
large files. The PC feels sluggish because the drive is no longer
efficient. The end result in Falcon 4 is stuttering because instead
of the textures all being together in a contiginous block they
are spread all over the drive. As the drive heads roam aroung
the drive gathering up the textures Falcon 4 has to pause until
the textures are loaded. Loading times themself will also be increased.
Defrag fixes this by putting all the parts of the files back together.
It is good housekeeping to Defrag your drives monthly. To defrag
your drive click on "Start" Select "Run" type "defrag" without
the quotes. On widows 95 you can just sit back and wait for it
to finish tidying up your drive. On Windows 98 however, it is
worth looking at the extra settings that you can use. Click the
settings box, you will be presented with the following options.
The option that we are particularly interested is Rearange Program
Files So My Programs Start Faster. Sounds good dosen't it? Well
it's not, it's bad. Let me qualify that, it's great for applications
such as Office etc but it's bad for games like Falcon 4 etc.
How it works is it moves your commonly used files to the start
of the drive (the centre ring of the disk). This means that
the drive head dosen't have to move far to load these files
and thus they load quicker. With games such as Falcon 4 we want
ALL the files in one contiginous block so that the heads don't
have to move far when they are loading textures during the game.
For the same reason I recommend using Windows built in Defrag
rather than Nortons unless you are very familiar with Nortons advanced features. So
make sure this option is unticked and then click "OK"
hit "Start" and soon you will have a nice tidy hard
drive.
HOT TIP:
Defrag is only interested in individual files and does not care
about directory structures so it will make no attempt to keep
your game files together. If you have a second drive or partition
large enough, cut and paste your texture intensive games folders
onto the other drive before defragging then cut and paste them
back afterwards. This will keep all the game files together
in one contiginous block.
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