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19/08/2004 |
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Crackup Don Bradbury looks to a little utility program for checking disk fragmentation
The trouble with Microsoft’s current disk defragmenter (98/98SE/ME) is that, unlike with the earlier Windows 95 version, you get no indication of the degree to which the files on your disk(s) are fragmented before the defragmenter launches. That means you might be sat twiddling while Defrag does its stuff for minimal return. There’s little point in running Defrag if file fragmentation is low, say less than three or four percent. In addition, the calculation method of the Windows 95 version of Defragmenter is faulty. It often reports that a drive is not fragmented when it really is. What you need is a quick test of your disks to see how much fragmentation there is, and if it’s worth pressing on with defragmentation. Enter thefreebie utility, Crackup. I’ve been using it, and it’s neat.
Better to download Crackup, install it, run it, and check fragmentation. Then decide whether you need to run Defrag. Remember, it’s not only disk access speed we’re talking about; it’s commonly reckoned that corrupted files are easier to recover if they had been written contiguously at the time of the loss. Another reason for keeping an eye on the state of your disk(s). You can configure Crackup to give you a warning at user-definable levels of file fragmentation, though this is only activated if the boundary is breeched while Crackup is running. It also lets you scan your disk(s) automatically at timed intervals if you want, and you can ask it to check only moveable files or all the files on your disk(s). Only moveables are checked by default since unmovables cannot be defragged.
In conclusion Such utilities as Crackup are traditionally the lifeblood of shareware or freeware. In this case it was quite a while ago – 1998, to be precise - when it was written by Greg A Wolking and Bob Flanders, But quality will out - on a Windows ME machine it worked nicely. |
File
fragmentation, for those not in the know, arises when files are
written to the disk drive multiple times in such a way that they
cannot be written contiguously; that is, in adjacent clusters. That
makes it a somewhat slower job to read the file again than if the
disk heads didn’t have to dart around the disk finding the
scattered bits. Defragmentation gathers these parts together, writes
then contiguously, and re-writes the File Allocation Table (FAT),
and Windows Defrag is the applet that does it.
The
program can be asked to produce a report, and if you run the app and
minimize it, an icon appears in the running tasks list of Windows,
from where it can be summoned again, perhaps to check the effect of
some action of yours on file fragmentation.