Over Administration

Defragging is overrated in my humble opinion.

In the corporate environment where the computer has the OS and most of the applications installed onto a clean hard disk, its not a very big issue. Some organizations make the users save their data tonetwork drives, and that makes it even less of an issue.

There will always be users who are constantly filling drives with useless information, installing and uninstalling applications, shareware etc. These people will need more defragging than an average corporate user. But if your users can't update or install programs, then it won't be such a big problem.

A fargmented HD doesn't usually cause big problems, it makes a bit of a hit on performancem, and may in the extreme may make an already marginal machine slow enough to be unuseable. But these days there are few apps that tax a new PC, and HDs are huge, so its less and less of a problem.

James

Sounds like you have a situation where they want to make sure that nobody damages their computer installation.

Yes, the internal clocks will drift over time. How much depends on the accuracy of the clock oscillator, and how much time they spend in the off state. If the machines are but into suspend mode, or are left on, clock drift shouldn't be much of a problem.

In a large organization, it is common to lock users out of installing updates, and software. There are a large number of users out there that think they know what they are doing.
The policy is also part of software control so that no unlicensed software is installed. This is the only proactical way to enforce software control in a large organization.

As to defrag; On a practical basis, you really only need to defrag when new software or updates are installed. This is especially true if the systems have been setup with a permanent paging (swap) file. If most files are stored on the network drives, there is no need for regular defrag on the user drives.
Also, I am not certian, but I believe that W2K does not have a built in defrag. Therefore, to have a licensed copy installed on each PC is a major expense.

As companies get "religion" on software licenses, you can expect more and more companies to adopt strict policies on what users are allowed to do with their assigned PC.

Yes, it is resonable for a company to have strict rights over what users can and cannot do to the companies PC's. Many years on the help desk have taught me that more than 50% of problems are caused by users installing software or generally just playing with their PC settings. Locking down the desktops is the current thinking, (that's why it's part of the W2K standard settings). the interna clock setting is easy to fix. My boss wanted all the PC's on the network to have the same time. In Novell, you just have to click a button. Microsoft, (always behind) makes you add a line to a batch file(login script). I have a program (free) from NIST running on my server. It checks the atomic clock a couple of times a day. When the users log in, theypull the time from the server. Everyone has the same time, and it's always right. It only takes about 15 minutes to setup. Defrag, as mentioned, is not as useful as it was in years past. Maybe at home, if you load and unload a lot of software, it could help once a year or so. Since I reformat my HD every couple of years, it hasn't been necessary for me to use.
Hope that helps.

All I want to say is "Users don't have rights!"
To make your job as stress free as possible, lock the desktop down. Give the users enough permissions to do their job and no more. If they can't "fiddle", they can't break it.