Ask LH: What Kind Of Maintenance Do I Need To Do On My Windows PC?

Dear Wringing,

You’re right, people talk a lot about ways to “speed up Windows” or keep your system well-maintained, but Windows has evolved a lot, and some of those are outdated. Even worse, some of them are just downright wrong, so here’s our short list of the maintenance tools you do and don’t want to run.

Update Windows : We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: Don’t neglect Windows Update. Install updates when it gets them, and restart your computer if necessary. This will keep your computer safe and stable, and really takes no effort on your part.

Run Microsoft Security Essentials : It’s a sad fact of life, but if you’re using Windows, you’ll probably want some form of antivirus software running in the background. There’s no need to pay for antivirus , though — Microsoft Security Essentials is pretty great on its own. Of course, the best defence against malware is safe browsing, so the more responsible you are, the better off your computer will be — antivirus or no antivirus. For example the other month I’d filled my 500GB media drive with my cd/dvd collection, and copies to/from the drive had gotten ridiculously slow, a quick defrag check showed new files were starting to have thousands of fragments.

In my case I deleted 50GB worth of data, manually moved the worst offending files then let the defrag run some time during the night.

Defragging still matters if a traditional platter drive gets filled up (both for speed and drive health), but if people have never deleted anything and still have space free then it will make zero difference.

Is windows xp sp3 defrag - Scot's Newsletter Forums

From what I recall, Windows XP's built-in disk defragmentation utility was written by Diskeeper Software (formerly Executive Software) for Microsoft. It perform a very basic defragmentation. It could be that it was moving files around on the disk volume to create enough empty space so it could defragment the large file. I have noticed that this utility sometimes has to be run a second or even a third time to completely defragment a disk. From what I recall, Windows XP's built-in disk defragmentation utility was written by Diskeeper Software (formerly Executive Software) for Microsoft. It perform a very basic defragmentation. It could be that it was moving files around on the disk volume to create enough empty space so it could defragment the large file. I have noticed that this utility sometimes has to be run a second or even a third time to completely defragment a disk. As dismal Windows defrag utility may be, it wouldn't defrag just 1 file & quit. It simply doesn't work that way. Everytime the system is used, there are files being moved around. Any read/write sequence can move the system files to a new sector or cluster. Whether it was just 1 MP3 file or 100, it doesn't matter - there's always going to be some shuffling going on in the background.

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