My parents computer has been acting up and after about an hour of cleaning it up, removing programs, files, registry entries, I went to defragment it. This is what i found. It took over 15 hours to defragment and was barely any better than when it started.
Nice! I never liked windows standard defrag utility myself, but yeah that's pretty bad. Every time I work on a friends/family members computer I find the same thing. They never take the time to run any utilities, resulting in the same crap on every system. Windows should by default autorun defrags, most users don't even know it's there.
That must be the worst kept drive I've ever seen, even if it is just a picture! LOL! When it's that bad you need to run defrag multiple times to get an improvement in performance. I'd recommend checkdisk as well.
AT this point I think they need a fresh install of windows. Check disk isn't finding any errors, but this is just so bad at this point, that it's almost not worth the effort to save. Anyway, I thought I'd share it because I had never seen anything like it, nor considered it to be possibly to have a drive this messed up.
good night! imagine if it was fat32, it would be one solid red bar. I agree in that I've never been impressed with the bundled "utilities" that windows includes. You might consider a 3rd party defrag SW. True also, that it might require several passes to get you out of your funk. I just installed perfectdisk on all my machines, I think it's top shelf. if the defrag doesn't improve performance are you sure you don't have any unwanted critters on the machine? is it a 5400 or 7200rpm drive? worst case like you said fresh install...amazing how fast they are with nothing else installed!!
Probably a 5400. It a stock Dell Dimension something that is about 3 years old. Since even the newer 9150's or even the XPS 400's come with 5400's I can imagine it being a 7200. I've been wanting to format their computer for some time now, so this will probably give me the opportunity to do it. I love a computer with a fresh install.
yeah, I think most stock drives are 5400 regardless of 'MFG'. which is the opposite of what you'd find @ B.Buy & Fry's where 9/10 of them are 7200, 8MB buffer and so on well if you have all the SW you need to implement the "do-over" then fire it up...that's the other thing that bugs me about OEM stuff...no friggin' CD's to reinstall! fresh=fast
I recently had a Dell 9150 crash on me, to the point where it would not boot past an error screen. 2 months old, very nice computer, very low work load. In something like 16 years of working with computers, I hadn't seen a computer go down that bad without something physically breaking. Anyway, after about 3 hours of Dell support, I finally convinced them to send me all of the install, driver, and software discs, which was 5 total. I plugged the drive into another computer, copied eveything important and wiped the thing. After that, I reinstalled and it worked perfectly. Something went wrong with the in the windows boot instructions or something, so that I couldn't even get into safe mode. Dell then wanted the CD's back, which I was amazed that they would ask for them. Dell holds on to those things like their golden. I just built my own computer. I used a very high end Abit gaming board, high-end video card, 4Gb Ram, Raid 1/0, And a Dual Core processor. This thing is so amazing its rediculous, and it costs much less than the 9150. With the exception of a server, I wont be buying a name brand computer anytime soon. I frequently run 10+ memory eating programs on it, with 2 monitors going and I cant even notice any slowing.
I gots to get me one of those!!! but sadly the only RAID I have kills bugs. the mrs. thinks that the one we have is sufficient...it's all about the cost for her to which, won't you please donate to my new computer fund - inserts paypal donation link
ahhhhh, the red, it BURNS my eyes. I'm surprised the drive hasn't started smoking during data transfers or sounding like a loose fan belt on a '77 Camaro.
Maybe HD manufacturers should add that feature. People would definitely recognize a problem when a 150dB screech comes out of their computer. You would have to tell any person in ear-shot (guests, neighbors, etc) that it just needs to warm up first. Pretty Funny.
not to be stupid or anything but what is a defrag? this is good info to know since i just payed 1600 on a computer and want it to run at good performance like the day i bought it