Three Tips to Perk Up PC Performance Improve PC Performance Without Spending a Fortune Drew Robb
Remember how well your computers performed right after you installed them? You could access Web pages rapidly, word documents loaded in moments; in short, life was good. But after a year or so of use, things inevitably seem to slow down when it comes to operating PCs.
It's a fact of life that Windows-based computers tend to gradually lose performance over time. The question is what can you do about it? This article offers a few tips on how you can speed things up again. You may not reach the level of a brand new machine, but you can get very close.
PCs in Pieces
Writing files to a hard drive splinters files into hundreds of pieces, represented here in red. Fragmented files adversely impact PC performance.
One of the primary reasons for poor PC performance is a disease known as fragmentation. This is caused by the basic design of Windows. While writing and deleting hundreds of files each day, a PC rapidly scatters file fragments into whatever available hard drive space it can find. This saves time that would otherwise be spent locating blocks of free space large enough to accommodate intact files.
In order to make data retrieval possible within a fragmenting file system, every file has a header that gives the location and size of each fragment. While this system simplifies writing to a disk, it divides documents into thousands of pieces.
Unfortunately, for each fragment that exists, the computer has to do extra work to recompile all the pieces, which causes those long, annoying delays before files appear.
How fragmented do files become? According to a random study by Anaheim, Calif.-based American Business Research Company of 100 small-to-large companies that did not defragment their systems, the levels of file fragmentation were quite severe.
Fifty-six percent of NT/Windows 2000 workstations had files that had been fragmented into anywhere between 1050 and 8162 pieces. One in four companies reported finding files with as many as 10,000 to 51,222 fragments. In all cases, fragmentation exerted a heavy toll on performance.
How does fragmentation affect PC performance? According to tests conducted by the National Software Testing Lab (NSTL), a hardware and software testing firm of Conshohocken, Penn., disk fragmentation slows Windows NT/2000 workstations and servers by anywhere from 20 to over 220 percent.
Defragmenting a hard drive consolidates files and improves PC performance. Note the reduction of red fragments.
Try this quick test to find out how your hard drive is handling the fragmentation process. Go to the Start Menu and select Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and Disk Defragmenter. Click the Analyze button on the bottom left of the screen. I had one file in 2724 pieces and another with over 400. Unfortunately, this analysis is about the only useful information you'll get out of the defragmenter that's built into Windows 2000 and Windows XP.
When I began this article, I initiated a defrag using Windows' built-in tool. My computer thrashed around for hours before it finally completed the task. And that badly fragmented file still had 2724 pieces. This tool is just an inefficient piece of software that was designed for a time when hard drives were much smaller. It's also a pain to use if you have to defrag more than two or three desktops.
According to an analysis by IDC, the Windows built-in defrag utility has to be run manually, which makes it far too expensive to use in terms of the admin time involved. In a small company with just one server and ten workstations, for example, it would take 572 staff hours per year at a cost of $25,168 to manually run the utility on each machine.
IDC recommends an application such as Executive Software, Inc.'s Diskeeper, a tool that not only lets you schedule regular defrag sessions, but also lets you install and set schedules over a network. It costs a small business $19.95 per PC.
"A growing number of people know that fragmented files on disks cause an overall degradation in system performance," says IDC Senior Research Analyst Frederick W. Broussard.
"Even though the actual numbers may vary from customer to customer," Broussard continues, "when considering the significant impact on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), it is difficult to find any argument to position the manual defragmenter over automated, network defragmentation."
