My laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth and like most Windows machines it is slowing down considerably.  Tom Evslin wrote about this phenomenon earlier this year and came up with the wonderful image of barnacles.  Oddly though he did not mention file fragmentation as one of the biggest sources of barnacles.  Windows XP does a terrible job at keeping the disk from becoming completely jumbled and the defrag utility that comes with Windows XP must not have been touched in a decade.  I have now run it three times consecutively and the image of my hard disk still looks like the ouput of a spectrometer.  There are systems files that the defragger doesn’t touch at all and then there are mysterious files that the defragger simply refuses to put into contiguous space on the disk.  Time to shell out money for one of the commercial offerings that actually gets the job done.

My laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth and like most Windows machines it is slowing down considerably.  Tom Evslin wrote about this phenomenon earlier this year and came up with the wonderful image of barnacles.  Oddly though he did not mention file fragmentation as one of the biggest sources of barnacles.  Windows XP does a terrible job at keeping the disk from becoming completely jumbled and the defrag utility that comes with Windows XP must not have been touched in a decade.  I have now run it three times consecutively and the image of my hard disk still looks like the ouput of a spectrometer.  There are systems files that the defragger doesn’t touch at all and then there are mysterious files that the defragger simply refuses to put into contiguous space on the disk.  Time to shell out money for one of the commercial offerings that actually gets the job done.