Defragmenter

[figure]

Hi,

When the defragmenter is running, it also shows what the different colours represent eg. white - free space, red - defragmenting files etc. Green represents contagious files. Is that a 'good' contagious or does it mean something bad? I am not sure what contagious means in this instance. Can you please explain? Thanks for your help.

[kempie]

contiguous
adj.
1. Sharing an edge or boundary; touching.
2. Neighboring; adjacent.

[vehelpfulguy]

When a hard disk is formatted it creates lots of small areas for holding data.

All your data is stored in these small areas.

A large single file may be too large to hold in one small area, so it is split up into smaller parts and spread across a number of these small areas (even though you still see it as just one file).

A file may be split up and parts stored in different places all over the disk (fragmented).

Or a file may be split up but held in a logical order (contiguous).

It is best if a file is contiguous as Windows can load it quicker as the hard disk will not need to hunt all over the disk for it.

But in real terms a user would hardly notice much difference between a file being fragmented or contiguous.

When you defragment a hard disk Windows tries to tidy up a disk my taking all the fragmented files and making them contiguous.

[figure]

Vehelpfulguy,/b>, you couldn't have chosen a better name ;-)
Thank you very much for that thorough explanation. It answered my question and helped me to understand the meaning of defragmenting.

[Whickerman]

I'd defrag my pc more often but it takes the contagious.

Sorry about that - couldn't resist.

[ACtheTROLL]

<in real terms a user would hardly notice much difference between a file being fragmented or contiguous>

true if only a single file .... but untrue if .... (as is generally the case) it's all the files on the PC. It's extremely true with fat 16 and 32 filesystems and almost (but not quite so) true with NTFS

It's almost as if windows was designed as a fragmentation machine .... it succeeds in this field far better than in others I could mention.

With vista there is no need to defrag the disc as (because it's so unnoticeable) it's now built in to the automatic system "housekeeping" schedule.

one wat of getting round the problem is to run the system for a few weeks ... then in advanced settings create a fixed size pagefile (approx 1.5-2 x your total system ram)

or .... if you have a second HDD .... create a small partition (5-10Gb) and host the file there