A simple program to speed-up a PC ?
A simple program to speed-up a PC ?
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vlc

Original Poster:

1,014 posts

275 months

Tuesday 8th August 2006
quotequote all
In the old days of DOS there was a small prog called chkdsk.exe, with which you could easily de-fragment your hardisk, so is there another 'simple' prog like this about for a modern o/s?

unlike the crapy current microsoft one which tries to defragment the 'entire' disks data, when i only want to...

1. defragment files.
2. move popular progs to the quicker accessed disk region.

NOT optimize the whole damn disk of its many gigabytes of data!

PS- is it true theres a prog which speeds-up www surfing by removing the LAN coding from the windows o/s?

Baconbonce

579 posts

265 months

Tuesday 8th August 2006
quotequote all
Chkdsk.exe doesn't defrag your hard disk it just verifies the integrity of the file system on a disk or volume

XP has this same functionality - go to the Properties of your disk, click the Tools tab and click Check Now.

Alternatively, drop to a command prompt and type chkdsk.
(typing chkdsk /? will give you all the options you can use)

If you want to try and speed up the boot process, do a Google for bootviz which enables you tweak and move the files required for boot around on the disk. Might be worth a try, but didn't notice much difference myself when I tried it.

Other than that, get hold of a copy of ccleaner from [url]www.ccleaner.com[/url]. Great little program and it's amazing how much crap you can find and clean with it.


Edited by Baconbonce on Wednesday 9th August 00:01

ThatPhilBrettGuy

11,810 posts

270 months

Wednesday 9th August 2006
quotequote all
www.sysinternals.com and get contig. That can defrag exactly what you want.

thepassenger

6,962 posts

265 months

Wednesday 9th August 2006
quotequote all
Windows 95 - > ME and Windows 2000 & XP (but NOT NT4) have built in defrag progrms.
In XP go Start > All Programs > Acessories > System Tools
You should see "Disk Defragmentor" listed.

Although I hate to say it but it defragging won't do much to help a system that's suffering in other areas regardless of which companies products you throw at it.

btw. the program in DOS was originally chkdsk which in later versions of DOS and Win9x became scandisk.

Jinx

12,022 posts

290 months

Wednesday 9th August 2006
quotequote all
thepassenger said:
Windows 95 - > ME and Windows 2000 & XP (but NOT NT4) have built in defrag progrms.
In XP go Start > All Programs > Acessories > System Tools
You should see "Disk Defragmentor" listed.

Although I hate to say it but it defragging won't do much to help a system that's suffering in other areas regardless of which companies products you throw at it.

btw. the program in DOS was originally chkdsk which in later versions of DOS and Win9x became scandisk.


I think the DOS program was defrag in this case as chkdsk and scandisk only checked for bad sectors and dodgy file tables.


Edited by Jinx on Wednesday 9th August 11:37

aldi

9,292 posts

267 months

Wednesday 9th August 2006
quotequote all
vlc said:
PS- is it true theres a prog which speeds-up www surfing by removing the LAN coding from the windows o/s?


You should unbind the Client for MS networks and File & Print sharing from the dial-up adapter if you're using a local modem. XP does this for you. You can check the properties of the adapter and make sure theres no ticks there, I don't see it having any real effect on surfing speed though TBH (unless you've got your c: drive shared out to the internet and people are using it to rape your goat porn collection 24/7 of course)

Whats wrong with defrag.exe anyway, I think you've hurt it's feelings

Edit: Just a thought, if you want performance how about right click my computer, properties, advanced, performance options, 'optimize for performance' - can make a nice difference.

Edited by aldi on Wednesday 9th August 13:32

thepassenger

6,962 posts

265 months

Wednesday 9th August 2006
quotequote all
aldi said:
Whats wrong with defrag.exe anyway, I think you've hurt it's feelings


I get the impression that the main bone of contention people have with the Microsoft defrag utility is that it appears slow (because it builds all the data to be shuffled first) and doesn't seem to do anything (leaves white spaces behind despite saying 'done').

A lot of the other utilities seem to do thier data collecting on-the-fly so whilst starting faster they grind around a bit and generally take the same length of time; they also make sure that all the little blocks are together in the display. Ultimatley both do the same job though

And not related but yes I know chkdsk / scandisk were errors and had nowt to do with defrag.exe
DEVICE=C:DOSHIMEM.SYS
DEVICE=C:DOSEMM386.EXE RAM
And all that jaz

aldi

9,292 posts

267 months

Wednesday 9th August 2006
quotequote all
I preferred NOEMS myself

thepassenger

6,962 posts

265 months

Wednesday 9th August 2006
quotequote all
aldi said:
I preferred NOEMS myself

Ahh but did you DOS=HIGH,UMB though?

vlc

Original Poster:

1,014 posts

275 months

Wednesday 16th August 2006
quotequote all
thepassenger said:
Windows 95 - > ME and Windows 2000 & XP (but NOT NT4) have built in defrag progrms.

Does this mean then, that when files are saved by these o/s, they save every file in an unbroken block of data, ie- never fragmented?

if so, i suppose this explains why these platforms dont contain the 'defrag.exe' prog that pre-win-32bit o/s once contained in their main folder.

agent006

12,058 posts

294 months

Thursday 17th August 2006
quotequote all
vlc said:
thepassenger said:
Windows 95 - > ME and Windows 2000 & XP (but NOT NT4) have built in defrag progrms.

Does this mean then, that when files are saved by these o/s, they save every file in an unbroken block of data, ie- never fragmented?

if so, i suppose this explains why these platforms dont contain the 'defrag.exe' prog that pre-win-32bit o/s once contained in their main folder.


Read it again. NT4 is the only one without a defrag program.

Besides, the performance hit of writing every file contiguously would far outweigh any benefit.

bez_uk

172 posts

242 months

Thursday 17th August 2006
quotequote all
there are a few programs that 'speed up your internet' in various ways:

some change computer settings, pipelines, connections bla bla bla to get minimal improvement.

Others such as onspeed, reduce the quality of incoming images allowing then to be sent quicker making noticable speed increases for dialup connections.

But in short your better off getting broadband if its available in your area, it's way faster, especially with speeds reaching 16Mbit download on residencial lines!

vlc

Original Poster:

1,014 posts

275 months

Monday 4th September 2006
quotequote all
bez_uk said:
But in short your better off getting broadband if its available in your area, it's way faster, especially with speeds reaching 16Mbit download on residencial lines!

i was about to last month, but stopped when they said they'd need to drill 2 holes thru my home walls to connect-up my pc to their outdoor-cable box junction!

an i'm not allowed to authorise that kind'a work in my property.

Bodo

12,612 posts

296 months

Monday 4th September 2006
quotequote all
vlc said:
i was about to last month, but stopped when they said they'd need to drill 2 holes thru my home walls to connect-up my pc to their outdoor-cable box junction!

an i'm not allowed to authorise that kind'a work in my property.
Install this prog and use a wlan connection. This doesn't need holes drilled as much as it doesn't defrag your hdd by design. Great, innit?

mcflurry

9,191 posts

283 months

Monday 4th September 2006
quotequote all
When defrag was first written a hard drive was about 20mb in size and had an access time of eleventy million seconds. With todays 7200 rpm drives as standard and access times under 10ms is it really gonna make that much difference?

bez_uk

172 posts

242 months

Monday 4th September 2006
quotequote all
More so... for example, loading games when you might be filling half your ram up with textures, yes HDs are fast but they are also very large, loading a large chuck of data from the same area on the disk will be a lot faster than if it's spread out through Gb's worth of data.

Edited by bez_uk on Monday 4th September 19:44