Chips' Fun House ~ View topic

Just a note to those who actually bother to maintain your machine by properly defragging on a fairly regular basis. I had been lax in doing this seeing my machine is always in use and the large partitions I have take some time to finish. Today, I had some probs.

My games are stored on a 30 gig partition on a 120 gig drive. I only have about 2 gigs left on this drive. When I went to defrag it today, it was about 17% fragmented. After I defragged...it was 27%. Ran it again and it was 56% fragmented... Shocked

Seems those darn .gcf files are so big, they can't be properly moved if you have little room left on your drive...big problem.

The only thing I could think to do is move them (8.08 gigs) to another partition, defrag the games drive...then move them back. I believe this will work, I'll let ya know. Cool

Well...this worked just perfectly. After defragging the drive...I got it down to 1% defragmented. After moving the .gcf files back...it was at 1.2% fragmented.

So...if you're low on disk space on the drive steam is installed on, move the .gcf files to another partition or drive (if you can) before defragging.

It will save you a lot of time (defraggin serveral times...less info on drive to defrag) and make it painless. Wink

I hate to defrag I do it but i hate it. i usually try to do it in the morning when i am at work so its done when i get home. Man just thinking about it is giving me chills

Yeah defragging sucks...I do it about once a month. But mine usually doesn't take that long because I've hardly used any of my memory.

How do you go about moving files off to different 'partitions' of your drive?

windows sees partitions of one physical drive as separate drive letters. so when you move files to different "drive letters".. well, just pretend you have more than one hd in that situation Razz

When you open a file, change it and then save it again...windows saves it in the first available space for it. If it doesn't fit, only a portion is saved there and the rest saved in the next available space. Open and save it again...it can be fragmented even more. This is a rather simple explanation.

Each time you access this file...it takes windows a fraction longer to access it...because it's "scattered" in different places on your hard drive. Defragmenting your drive attempts to put all these pieces of all fragmented files back together again so windows can access and run them quicker.

It's good practice to do this at least every few months.

to make sure it doesnt take long, i defrag once every wednesday night. i wake up in the morning and its all clean. so i dont have to worry about spending 2 days defragging Laughing

(had to do that to my old compy Embarassed

)

It got..... more fragmented.... by defragging? *headache*

Aud...that's exactly what happened to me. That's why I suggested moving those huge .gcf files (again, if you can) BEFORE you defragment.

I went through the process twice as described above before I came up with a solution. I feel your pain.... Twisted Evil

Windows defrag sucks, for a start.

Luckily, I have gigantic hard disks (2x 160gb, and 1x 200gb) so I'm not that short of space, but if you have more ram, a good defrag program could cache files in that while it moves them about to speed things up.

Forum Soldier Joined: 25 Nov 2004 Posts: 417

I still wonder why windows can't keep up with linux, linux doesn't mess up things like windows.

Forum Soldier Joined: 25 Nov 2004 Posts: 417