Wednesday 2 September 2009

Five Best Disk Defragmenters

This article Five Best Disk Defragmenters from Lifehacker which I came across while browsing through digg.com took me back some. All the while Randall C. Kennedy is bitching about GUIs that don't meet his high journalistic standards and Linux design concepts "contaminating" Windows, Windows users are still defragmenting their hard drives? I mean seriously!

I can remember having to defrag my hard drive when I was using MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows XP Professional. I can remember setting the PC upat night to run it's course and it still wouldn't be done by morning.  In the days of MS-DOS to Windows 3.11 I only had a tiny hard drive. A few hundred megabytes of capacity. When I got Windows 95 I moved up to a Quantum Bigfoot 1 GB drive. Which back then was huge! With Windows 98 and 98 SE I leapt up to 8GB and 10GB drives.

Defragging my PCs hard drives back then seemed to take forever. It was something you planned in advance. You'd have to clear your schedule for the week and mark it in the diary before hand. And after all the effort to get your files sorted out into easily accessible contiguous blocks of data, they were all messed up again as soon as you used your PC. Defragging was and still is a truly pointless endeavour. And Windows users are still doing this?

I was of the impression Windows Vista was supposed to have ushered in a new era? Windows 7 was to build on that and make it better? Why then are Windows users still behaving as though they're using MS-DOS? With my current Dell XPS 720 I have 1.5TB of internal storage on the hard drives and an addition 1TB extrenal drive. That's 2.5 terrabytes in total I'd have to defragment if I were still using Windows. The very thought alone gives me hives.

In my opinion defragmenting a hard drive on a PC is not only pointless. It's archaic. It's pre-stone age technology. Nobody should have to do this any longer. There are file systems out there in the real world being used everyday that essentially avoid this problem altogether. I've never defragmented a Linux hard drive. Not when I was using Red Hat Linux years ago. Not While using openSuSE and never while using Ubuntu. It's something I have simply never needed to do. It didn't even enter my mind until i read the Lifehacker article.

Microsofties really need to wake up and demand better from their masters.

No comments:

Post a Comment