Within the last year I've acquired two machines running Windows Vista. One 32 bit desktop with a 160 gig hard drive and one 64-bit laptop with a 320 gig hard drive. The desktop is my wife's computer and I'm normally not on it . I had occasion to use it and noticed that it was running exceptionally slow, a check on PC pitstop showed that the drive transfer rate had fallen from 54 MB/s to about 30 MB a second, and the drive was heavily fragmented. The computer had been set to automatically defrag weekly.
Here's where the plot thickens, I could not get the file fragmentation below about 35% after a day of work, And trying several defragmentation utilities, and had assumed the drive was in the process of failing, and was about to purchase a new hard drive.
That is when I noticed that my two week old laptop hard drive was fragmented and its data transfer rates have fallen significantly. Attempts to defrag the laptop were only marginally more successful than they had been on the desktop.
The final solution for the desktop was that I deactivated file paging, and enabled the write cache. I also used the built in Vista hard disk manager to partition the drive into a C & D partitions without reloading. I managed to get my file fragmentation down to about 18% and the data transfer rates back up to about 45 MB per second when I finished I re-enable file paging and figured that that was as good as it was going to get without being reloaded.
One bit of additional information is that one of the defragmentation programs I use had a graphical spherical representation of the file storage, the file storage pattern resembled an open choke shotgun pattern at 50 yards.
I went ahead and reloaded the laptop from the backup partition , and also partitioned that hard drive into a C & D partitions. On both computers I try and load as many programs as possible on the D partition .
I also had enabled daily defragmentation on the desktop. Now as to what I am confused about. The day after I had stopped working on the desktop it's file fragmentation droped to about 4% the drive transfer rate returned to about 54 MB per second and the graphical image appeared normal.
Both machines seem to require defragmenting at least weekly and sometimes more often to maintain performance and generally run 10 to 15% fragmentation versus my XP machine that gets several times more use, whose performance remains relatively constant , the raid array runs about 125 MB per second and I defrag after large file changes or when I feel like it, it's typical file fragmentation is in the 2% range.
My question does anybody have any ideas, I have the problem at least partially under control, but it is annoying to have to constantly defrag both machines, the automatic defragmentation can't be relied on as the machines may be shut off at the scheduled defragumentation time.
As my lead line implied these machines seem to be operating more in line with quantum mechanics, a carefully applied scientific method has led me to the conclusion that Vista's filing system is based on the uncertainty principle, and confirmed that God does indeed play dice.
Vista and the uncertainty principle.
Re: Vista and the uncertainty principle.
