>>> What do you call the process of ridding the hard drive of all the >>> excess >> space taken up on the hard drive by erased files? It is something >> we are >> all supposed to do to our system periodically and I am darned if I >> can >> remember what it is called. >> I don't think that anyone so far has gotten the answer correct. Fragments of erased files are removed by emptying the recycle bin. The reason for this is that those fragments are necessary if you need to undelete a file you can do so until you have emptied the recycle bin.
Defraging moves the fragments of files together so that the file can be opened more quickly. Why do files get fragmented? That happens because when a file is saved it uses whatever space is available, and there may not be a contiguous part of the drive available, so the file must be saved in fragments in various places. XP is supposed to need defragmenting less than earlier versions of Windows. Not that the files don't get fragmented but that XP can pick up the frags quickly anyway. Another process that is not used as often these days if check disk, the program name is actually chkdsk. Old time DOS users will recognize the name. CHKDSK verifies the blocks of disk space for damage and I think fragments of those erased files that are no longer linked to any files. It fixes what it can if you add /f as an argument to the command. There are other programs in XP that are designed to optimize disk usage to make it more efficient. CHKDSK and Defrag may improve how quickly files are loaded no matter how large or small your dive is. CHKDSK may prevent problems from damaged sectors, although this kind of damage seems less common. If you are trying to make space on your drive because you are reaching the limit if it's capacity, you might want to consider purchasing a new drive because most people who are in the know say that a drive should have some a percentage of space that is free of files. This is probably because the file system may use that space for temporary operations. As I was typing a term came to mind called slack. Understanding what slack space is requires some understanding of how files are saved. A file that is a few hudred bytes may take up as much disk space as one that is two killbytes. That's because each drive is formatted into allocation units. If these allocation units are large, somtimes they are 4096 bytes in size, a small file will use up one whole unit. You can't put two files in one allocation unit. Slack is the left over space in an allocation unit that is empty space, not part of a file. For the most part there's not much the user can do about slack space. If one of my partitions becomes empty I sometimes reformat it because I can choose smaller allocation units. I don't know whether this does any good, my drives are very large, some are 120 Gigabytes, one is actually 160 Gigabytes. And now you can buy drives that are even larger. Most of us don't need drives that large but at least we don't need to worry about slack space. :-) Jim ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12h6grq0b/M=362131.6882499.7825260.1510227/D=groups/S=1705115386:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1124297083/A=2889191/R=0/SIG=10r90krvo/*http://www.thebeehive.org ">Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job) Welcome to the Sweet Life - brought to you by One Economy</a>.</font> --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> If you have any questions or problems with any aspect of this site, please feel free to contact me directly [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please do not post personal issues directly to the group. To unsubscribe from this list, send an email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thank you for using A-1 Computer Tech Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/A-1-Computer_Tech/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
