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  • #2275224

    how to speed my pc

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    by walona ·

    what are the differences between scan disk and defragment, since my os is XP.

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    • #3368140

      Reply To: how to speed my pc

      by drb63 ·

      In reply to how to speed my pc

    • #3368121

      Reply To: how to speed my pc

      by pierrejamme ·

      In reply to how to speed my pc

      You normally need to scandisk first and then defragment your hard drive. If you start defrag first it may say you have a disk error and you should run scandisk.
      You didn’t give too many specifics, however I could assume two things:
      1. you don’t have enough memory to run XP, you should have 512MB as far as I am concerned. And a good video card with 32MB or More Video RAM that is not borrowed from your RAM chips.
      2. Your system has been cluttered with Malware/SpyWare/Adbots, very typical these days. You need to run at least two of the better free AdAware programs. Suach as Adaware 6 from: http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ and SpyBot Search and Destroy from: http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=download
      Update both and the remove everything they find.

    • #2736395

      Reply To: how to speed my pc

      by pctech ·

      In reply to how to speed my pc

      Scandisk checks the file system to make sure there are no errors with the file system. Truncated files, wrong file dates, wrong file size, ect. Scandisk will also do a surface scan where it checks the drive for bad spots, unreadable or failing areas of the hard drive.
      Defrag works by placing files in a contiguos order on the hard rive. This makes for faster reads and writes and works your hard drive less than a fragmented file system. Depending on the partition size and format ( FAT16, FAT32, NTFS ) allocations units ( clusters )are set up for files on your hard drive. FAT16 would be able to access up to a 2 gig. partition, but any partition above 511 mgs. was ineffective for FAT16 because it would use a larger allocation block for each file. Here is how FAT16 allocated file space on your hard drive:
      Partition Size: Cluster Size:
      16 – 127 mgs. 2K
      128 – 255 mgs. 4K
      256 – 511 mgs. 8K
      512 – 1023 mges. 16K
      1024 – 2047 megs. 32K

      ….. Continued in next post

    • #2736394

      Reply To: how to speed my pc

      by pctech ·

      In reply to how to speed my pc

      ….. Continued from previous post
      The operating system will allow only one file to reside in a cluster so a lot of small files wasted a lot of space on larger partitions. A file that is 6K in size was allocated 32K of hard drive space on a 1024 meg. partiton and no other files are allowed to use this cluster. Result, 26K of wasted space on the hard drive for that one file. Now let us say that you have a file that is 34K in size. The OS would take the first 32K of that file and put it in the first available cluster and the remaining 2K of the file would go into the next available cluster. This may be several clusters away from the first part of the file since it can not be placed in any already occupied cluster, even if it would fit. Result, file fragmentaion. Derag takes the files and places them into contiguos clusters on the hard drive for faster reads and writes and worked the hard drive less since it did not have to move the heads to multiple areas of the drive to access the same file.
      FAT32 used 1/2 the cluster size per file that FAT16 used for the same partiton size so less hard drive space was used for the same file. Roughly a 50% savings of hard drive space for small files. You could nearly double your available hard drive space by simply converting from FAT16 to FAT32. Since hard drives were selling for around $1.50/meg. at the time FAT32 was brought into use, this was a huge savings to the end user.

      I hope this helps you.

    • #3367667

      Reply To: how to speed my pc

      by techierob ·

      In reply to how to speed my pc

      Yes. PC specs would be nice. XP can be installed on a pentium 133, but it wont neccesarily run. My old duron 800 and 256 sd ram ran it fine for windows use 🙂
      **IMO I did have ATA 100 and a 7200 rpm harddrive 🙂

      Speed in PC terms can be put down to three interactions:
      CPU speed
      RAM amount / speed
      Hard drive speed / access speed

      You might have a 2000+ and 512 mb of DDR but if you are only transferring data over an ATA 66 interface on an old ass harddrive with no cache and only 5200 rpm access speed, then naturally its going to be slow. Defragging should only be neccesary on FAT32 systems anyway 🙂

      Inspect free space, virtual and physical memory and access between hard drive and mobo. As what the other posters suggested, it may be the fact that your XP is just chokkas of “crap”. Check physical specs of your PC, if its anything above 256 SD and 1000 mhz, it should be fine really. XP by nature is a ram slug, so Id look there first.

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