Comments on: Are you a digital packrat?

By: SilverDelta

SilverDelta — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 14:38:57 +0000

OMG! 4 h 26 min to defrag a 40 GB drive? You need to defrag more regularly :O Diskeeper takes < 5-10 min on my 160GB drive, but I defrag regularly (once a week) to prevent fragmentation build-up.

Make sure you have atleast 15-20% free space, it will hasten the defrag process.

Run diskcleanup or Ccleaner to clean out the temp files and junk from the drive and to reclaim some more space.

Then run defrag with a good defragger like Diskeeper, and it will take only a short time even for larger drives. If you are the proscrastinating type :D then turn on the auto defrag mode on diskeeper, and it will defrag the drives automatically whenever the PC is not busy and you wont have to bother about it anymore.

By: jdiver

jdiver — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:24:13 +0000

You can download Steffen Gerlach's Scanner here: http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/

By: jdiver

jdiver — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 15:21:51 +0000

For visualizing disk usage on Windows PCs, I prefer the program Scanner written by Steffen Gerlach. It uses a pie chart to show disk usage. It is simple to use, very fast and small. You can right-click on items to zoom in, open folders in Windows Explorer, and remove files. It is a single executable file that does not need to be installed. I keep it on my flash drive so I can run it on any Windows PC. I have tried using many other programs to analyze my disk usage but I always end up coming back to this one.

By: hyjak

hyjak — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:02:22 +0000

I think this is a nightmare that atleast 50% of users experience:D We just tend to keep adding and adding and installing and installing. The drive gets suffocated and turns asthmatic when its fragmented as well. Both together turn it into a crawlie that makes you want to pull out your hair. Nice tips to prevent that. Most importantly, never procrastinate:)