This is great information.

Ron,
I was wondering how often you should defrag your system. I do it about every quarter or so but I am not on any schedule per say.

I have found that the more often I do it the less time it takes to complete. That is really the only reason I do it as often as I do.

Steve,

That would vary with usage. Windows is a messy O.S. and tends to string stuff all over. I defrag this computer nearly every day, but I use it a lot more than the other one, which I do about three times a week. And, yes the more often you defrag, the faster it will go as there won't be so many scattered files that it has to move out into an unused area of the disk to put together and them put them back. And I run the disk cleaner that is on the page where you find defrag too. It will pick up some things, but is not a great tool. Just make sure you have whatever you want it to clean checked. I leave my trash bin unchecked as I don't want it taking out anything I have in there. When I am sure I won't need whatever I have in the trash bin, I empty it by clicking on it and telling it to delete the files.

Ron :)

Thanks Ron,

Maybe I should defag more often.

Steve,

Another thing that I do and forgot to mention is if I am going to load an application program I always defrag just before I load it. That way it won't load the files into scattered clusters as it will load all together and that makes it a little faster.

Ron :)

Get a Mac. Problem solved.

Clay,
Thanks, but no thanks on the Mac.

What?????:eek: Clay???:LOL:

Ron, how do you clean out the pagefile?

Mike

Mike,

Go to the My Computer Icon and right click it to get the menu. Click Properties like before for the System Restore but this time select the Advance Page tab and bring it to the top. Then select Performance and Advanced on that page. On the 2nd Advanced Page you will find a Settings Button. Click it and select Advanced and you will get a page with two or three things on it. Select Virtual Memory and Change. That will pop open the page that will tell you your Page File size. Make sure you write down the sizes they have in there if yours has a custom setting. Then click the No Page File to turn it off. You will get a warning that your computer may not operate right without a Page File, but ignore that. Then go back to the desktop and I believe you have to re-boot the computer or it may tell you to do so to make it go away. I then defrag the disk and go through the same procedures to put the Page File back in and any left over junk from removed programs and such is gone. Since the hard dives are pretty big now I just put the custom settings back in that it had when I got the computer. The Page File is just a section of disk that it uses as a memory and it will move anything you are doing to that and that way it speeds up things when the computer needs to access those files again. But as I said, when you delete programs or look at stuff it will move that into that section and that is what shows up as green unmovable files when you do the defrag. On our big switching computers we had a circuit pack that did this except when it got to a set point it would automatically kick out the thing that had not been used for the longest time. For instance this computer has two stand alone 500Gig drives and my other one has a 1 Tet drive.

Ron :)

Good point about the old days when hard drives were small and every little bit of space was needed. Now that I have a really HUGE hard drive does not mean I keep everything either, you STILL need to clean house from time to time.

But I don't worry about storage anymore, it is unlikely I will ever push the limits of a 600 gig hard drive. :D Well, that IS possible if I keep recording TV programs and never delete them. So I keep the Media Center recorded programs cleaned up for that reason.

:)

Ernie,

You do the same as I do. I never have any of my drives even close to half full, but I guess old habits are hard to break. And like when you were getting that virus out of your friends computer and it kept coming back, cleaning out the Page File and System Restore every once in a while will save you some grief at times. I like this computer with the two stand alone 500 Gig hard drives as I can just copy all of my graphics and space eating stuff onto the "D" drive and it is much faster to get when I want it than using a CD or DVD to copy it onto. And that speeds up the "C" drive too since that stuff is on the other disk.

Ron :)

I think it is a bit zippier than it use to be.

No gold cup eh? Just kidding.

Do you have filtering that forces many CRCs?

:D

:eek:

Tru,

I have so much darn filtering and firewalls and such that I have to keep most of them turned off as they tend to fight with each other and then I can't do anything. Sometimes I will switch between them just to use them, but I don't see that much advantage to most of them and any good hacker would break through in probably about 15 minutes. Except I turn my computers off when I am off line and if I am working on something here at home I have anything from online blocked.

Ron %/

Ron,

I had no idea you were such a geek! Thanks for the tips,

Mike

2 Tb of storage? What the he!! are you doing with all of that?:eek:

Mike,
Are you kidding? Ron is the man to go to when you have a problem with your PC. He has helped me for years now.

Steve....suit yourself, but in the Mac world, these discussions don't really exist. I too lived in the frustrating PC world for many years for business reasons and issues of compatibility. Those reasons have now all gone away.:cool:

Thats cause there is no one to talk to.

Mike

Actually the Mac is not a bad computer. I am not really as familiar with it as I should be, but some of my neighbors have them. However they are not trouble free and one of them even got a virus. I guess he left it out in the cold to long. :LOL:

Ron :p

Macs are not immune to viruses. Its just not worth writing them for the Mac (yet) since there a relatively very few of them in comparison to PCs. In fact I happened to here Kim Kommando (what a FOXY computer babe!) talk about this very subject this past weekend. She mentioned that incidents involving Macs were on the rise.

Mike

Definatly the gold cup thing has something to do with it. When I surf anonymous I have no problem. When the system recognizes me I'm screwed! I'll have to donate!

WTF!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :eek:

Where did my Gold Cup and Star go? Now, everything is so slooooooooow!

I'm melting!!!