One for the computer geeks

[Wood Butcher]

A friend of mine who is heavily into computing (eg. gaming) would format his HDD and do a fresh install at least once a month. "helps to keep the computer running at it's best" is his reasoning.

STUFF THAT!

I only format when I have to.

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

The main advantage of formatting on a periodic basis is it removes the excess baggage that invariably accumulates. I guess it's also one way of defragging the HDD.

I prefer to have seperate HDDs/partitions for the OS, programs, swap & volatile files. (docs, etc) I simply image the OS partition after setting things up on the first install (also with later OS updates) and make registry backups as new sw is installed.

Should the OS turn its' toes up I simply restore the image & latest reg backup. Should it be only one piece of sw playing up, well... that's a no-brainer. It's almost like WinXP's restore points except it does what XP should be doing and doesn't.

It requires some knowledge of the registry structure to set up (or a good tweaking util ) and only works on the system it was created for but IMHO is well worth he effort.

[outback]

I have a similar setup.
C:\ Windoze
D:\ Apps
E:\ Documents etc.

I used to reformat every twelve months or so, to clear the deck, I used to install a heap of trial stuff, then delete, always messy, and probably full of spywarre.

About three years ago I setup the harddrive with what I outlined above, all has gone well, but lately things have gone awry. My reimaging hasn't been as dilligent as it should. It started when I first got the latest version of Ghost and it wouldn't work. Things have gone downhill slowly ever since.

Won't be long and I'll be sitting in front of a blank screen feeding CD's. Oh joy.

[anthonyd]

Rowan,

I used to reformat every three months or so and yes it made a good enough difference to be worth it.

Since going to XP I do it about every 9 months now.

To be honest I think the reason is not because of XP, but because of the more modern size of hard drives. It is my opinion that most hard drives work their best untill they get to be about 30% full after which they appear to slow down. This might be due to fragmentation (every file system has it) ot just the fact that the extra files are no residing on the innermost cylinders and hence have slower transfer rates.

With the bigger hard drives I think it is just taking much loinger to get that full and hence it doesn;t slow down as quick.

I have been speculating for a while now about buying a 200gig hard drive and only partitioning it to 80gb and using that in the hope that it only uses the outermost cylinders - haven't tried it yet so I cant say if it works.

[Skew ChiDAMN!!]

To be honest I think the reason is not because of XP, but because of the more modern size of hard drives. It is my opinion that most hard drives work their best untill they get to be about 30% full after which they appear to slow down. This might be due to fragmentation (every file system has it) ot just the fact that the extra files are no residing on the innermost cylinders and hence have slower transfer rates.

In actuality, with modern drives xfer rates are fairly consistent across the platter. A mere human wouldn't notice the difference. Unless you've set it up with inappropriate interleave, but as most people only use WinXX to format I doubt that's likely. Not many people know what a real low-level format is nowadays. But it's possibly the filesystem you're using... FAT-XX is pretty inefficient with large no's of files. NTFS is better in this regard, as it has a better lowlevel "lookup" system, amongst other things. I really dunno why people set up FAT HDDs on W2K or XP... unless they're dual-booting of course.

It's also possible, if you're only familiar with Win systems, that what you're noticing is registry fragmentation. The swap file can be put on it's own partition to help prevent it frag'ing but the registry files can't, dammit. :mad: As the reg is written to so damned often it frags quickly and 'cos Win is constantly reading the reg, well... apparent slowdowns.

I wish they'd load it into protected mem at the start of a session and leave well enough alone. [sigh]

I have been speculating for a while now about buying a 200gig hard drive and only partitioning it to 80gb and using that in the hope that it only uses the outermost cylinders - haven't tried it yet so I cant say if it works.

All you need for the OS is a 1 to 5GB partition and, generally speaking, a 20-30GB partition for extra exes, then you can store data on the rest. This leaves all the binaries on the "faster" 15% of the HDD... but I've found this still won't prevent eventual slowdowns with Win.

You can always experiment by breaking the HDD down into several similar sized partitions and doing some IO speed tests on 'em. There's plenty of utils out there...

Linux and a couple of other OS's, now they're different stories.