GameRager: I ran a thorough defrag once using UltimateDefrag Free Edition.....NEVER AGAIN. It corrupted several OS directories when I run it before boot to defrag the OS/unmovable files as well. Had to reinstall windows.

EDIT: Just noticed that my pc has been defragging every week without me knowing. I wonder if that's why my old HDDs started corrupting after several months of use. Someone DID say a bit back that constant defragging ruins HDDs lifespans after all.

I shut the auto defrag off for now.....better to be safe than sorry.

Navagon: Yeah, you've got to be really careful with 3rd party defraggers. I only really use Mydefrag because it can run quietly in the background and won't effectively hijack the computer.

Running defraggers too often will wear out your drive faster than most disc-intensive operations you could throw at it. Anything more than once a month is pretty excessive. Even then it depends on just how badly it needs it.

Navagon: It may have been improved since I last used it but I still wouldn't recommend touching Defraggler with a bargepole. After I first used it all my PSD and 7zip files were corrupted.

chautemoc: There've been an arseload of updates (they come regularly), with major changes. Never had any corruption issues.

Coelocanth: It's not so much black and white as this: I rarely use my XP rig anymore for anything other than surfing the net and a few older games that are already installed on it. Why bother installing a new defrag program when the one I have is doing just what it needs to do? My rig works fine with what I'm using and I don't find I have any issues with performance. In short, there just does not seem to be a compelling reason to bother.

Drat: XP's default defragger is just a crippled version of Diskeeper. I installed the full Diskeeper 9 on a system on which I had been using the default defragger, and it showed the drive was quite fragmented, whereas the stripped version reported it as clean.

Navagon: Yeah, you've got to be really careful with 3rd party defraggers. I only really use Mydefrag because it can run quietly in the background and won't effectively hijack the computer.

Running defraggers too often will wear out your drive faster than most disc-intensive operations you could throw at it. Anything more than once a month is pretty excessive. Even then it depends on just how badly it needs it.

hedwards: Indeed, I've got mine set up to automatically do a major defrag every month or so and a minor defrag every week. Which is more than enough. I'd definitely stay away from settings that have the defrag process going constantly. If fragmentation is that much of an issue, you should be using a different filesystem.

hedwards: Indeed, I've got mine set up to automatically do a major defrag every month or so and a minor defrag every week.

Navagon: Even that might be a bit overboard if you're using Vista or 7 or your files have a habit of being written in fragments.

geminidomino: Holy thread necromancy, Batman.

On a Windows 7 system, you probably *don't* want to be running an external defrag program anymore. By Windows 7, Windows has stopped using the ancient and crufty FAT32 filesystem and uses NTFS, which handles allocation differently and fragments much less than the old one, and windows 7 runs a periodic defrag in the background. Using a 3rd party software is iffy at best, since they've been known to do things like crush the NTFS journal.

And for the love of all that's holy, *never* defrag an SSD.