David W. Fenton wrote:
. . . Fragmentation is a big issue. . . .Totally not true. I see it all the time on my XP Machine. I have to run the Windows Defragmenter or Disk Keeper all the time. And I don't do anything other than some basic internet, QuickBooks, and Finale. And the speed improvements are very noticeable. Plus every other week we have some sort of Windows patch that needs to be downloaded.......which doesn't do anything favorable for the state of fragmentation.
Not even close to being as important as disk caching, since it only matters on initial read of the file, and really only matters with large files.
. . . I know my
Windows XP machine has to get defragmented every couple of days, . . .
???
NTFS does basic background defragmenting (it doesn't rewrite the files into completely contiguous blocks, but does try to get the data pages into an order that is more efficient for the drive to read than the default assignment off the free chain).
I hardly ever defrag any of the machines I'm responsible for, and it's never improved performance noticeably when I've done it. Why? Because defragging basically is only relevant for large files that are read often. And once read, they are cached in memory, so if the original file image is fragmented, it really doesn't matter once it's been read into memory.
No, it is not. If your drive looks like swiss cheese and the HD is going all over the place to get files, then it matters. It's funny that you seem to know a lot, but don't really see that defragmentation does help with improved performance.
I don't think fragmentation matters for temp files.
Really? Have you tried it? I have, and I do notice improvement.
I disagree entirely. My bet is that all those files are in the disk cache, not being read/written from/to the disk each time (actually, an explicit save probably does a forced write to the original file, but changes in the temp files themselves are probably in the write-I don't think so. Perhaps one of the Finale tech guys on the list can explain it. I would be interested to know exactly what happens, not speculation about what happens.....
ahead cache, and reads are coming from the cache in most cases).
. . . I see my little hard drive light go on all the
time with Finale. . . .
That doesn't mean anything. OS subsystems may be doing any number of things that cause disk reads/writes.
But this harks back to the issue of fragmentation. If your drive is fragmented, it does take a toll on your performance. Doesn't matter, Windows or Mac.
I stopped worrying about it a long time ago when it became clear to me that MS had engineered something the worked extremely well and so there was no need to try to tweak it any more.So I suppose utilities like Disk Keeper (http://www.diskeeper.com/) then are totally useless. I can't imagine running my Windows machine without Diskeeper.....
_______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
