It used to save your hard drive. Now it will destroy your hard drive.
Memories of defragging your computer
Submitted 2 months ago by Mickey7@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/b40a3b73-cfe8-403e-9910-19bc3352c33a.png
Comments
homes@piefed.world 2 months ago
SW42@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hard drives used to be irony, now SSDs are more Silicony.
…
I’ll see myself out.
homes@piefed.world 2 months ago
heh
green_goglin@thelemmy.club 2 months ago
nice
krisevol@lemmus.org 2 months ago
We’ll we didn’t use harddrives anymore except for storage, so it not really irony. You still need to defrag harddrives today.
CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world 2 months ago
we didn’t use harddrives anymore except for storage
Parser failed-Syntax error - Kernel Panic
Storage? We still do. But we used to too.
chunes@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Back in 1995, my family got our first computer, and despite being a kid at the time, computer maintenance immediately fell in my lap because I immediately became the most tech-savvy person in the household.
Still, computers in '95 still had a lot of rough edges and so I found myself needing to call tech support on occasion. On one such occasion I got a guy on the line who immediately jumped on the opportunity to be a dick because he could tell I was a kid.
After describing my problem, he asked when the last time I ran a defrag was. (The problem had nothing to do with this.) When I replied that I didn’t know what a defrag was, he busted out laughing for like a full minute, and I could hear him telling his buddy and they started laughing again.
So yeah, that’s my defrag story I guess.
paladin235@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Your background of being the family computer expert closely mirrors mine. However, I was too stubborn to ever call support, and instead stumbled through slow internet searches and manuals. Wild how much easier computers are to operate these days.
Sorry for your bad support experience though. At least that hasn’t changed!
deltapi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ugh. MS-DOS 2.0-5.0 inclusive didn’t have a defrag tool. It was introduced with dos 6. While it could be helpful, the fact that we went more than a decade without a defrag tool as part of DOS reinforces just how optional it was/is. The benefit of defragging was that it would be marginally faster to read a file that was stored contiguously instead of in pieces. There was the side benefit as well that it was easier to recover data that wasn’t fragmented.
I’m not aware of any legitimate ‘Problems’ caused by simple fragmentation itself. That tech guy was not just wrong in his behaviour, but also in his technical knowledge. What an ass.
Blackout@fedia.io 2 months ago
It would take forever and I never could tell if it was worth it. Unlike the turbo button that allowed my pc to play myst in SD.
vrek@programming.dev 2 months ago
Fun fact is the turbo button wasn’t actually turbo anything. It pressed in was the default and designed speed. When it was depressed it set it to run at a lower clock speed. This was meant for older games where aspects of the game like movement and attack speed were tied to the clock rate. With a high speed cpu the game was unplayable so you take off turbo mode and it mostly fixed the issues.
jqubed@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I felt like the difference was only obvious if the disk had gotten really bad in the first place, but maybe it was just psychological from seeing the colors move around.
Klear@piefed.world 2 months ago
…for a whole day.
Tiral@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Looking back, honestly everything was so slow already I don’t think it was noticable. When it takes 5 seconds to see an app a start to open vs 6 you doesn’t notice much. Now with SSDs and such an extra second is like twice as long as it should take.
Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
Oh I just recently replaced Myst. Only outshined by Riven, such a great game.
kalpol@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I still have my original 5 disc set of riven.I need to image those and mount them in 5 virtual CDroms so I’m not changing disks constantly.
That game was hard as hell, I remember the last puzzle defeating me. Some of the clues were vague too. But man it was something.
Dultas@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Blue Prince, while vastly different, did bring up fond memories of those games.
W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
homes@piefed.world 2 months ago
oh, I could always tell the difference, but it would always take at least a day-and-a-half to run. it was difficult to go without the computer for that long
Dultas@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Needed to run it more frequently and you’d have much shorter cycles.
serpineslair@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 2 months ago
folekaule@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Obligatory “I can hear this GIF”
f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
The looping made me look for “Contents modified - Restarting…” 😅
over_clox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I still use Defrag for oldschool DOS/Win311/95/98 virtual machine disk images. After I’ve got the VM image set up the way I want, then I’ll defrag it, then write a nulled out DUMMY.BIN to the root folder filling all the free space, then delete the DUMMY.BIN file.
Doing that greatly improves compression of the final archived disk image.
deltapi@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m guessing dummy.bin is a zerofile?
over_clox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yep
rethnor@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Then installing Linux and wondering why I didn’t have to do this…
qprimed@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
ZC3rr0r@piefed.ca 2 months ago
This is the defrag I remember most. Back on a 286/386 it would really make a noticable difference in how fast files and programs would be found and loaded. From my Pentium-based Windows 95 machines and onwards I never noticed quite the same impact of defragging my drives.
vapordays@leminal.space 2 months ago
me to gen Z:
bullshit you dont defrag, you never fucking defragged
wizardfrag@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Is Gen Z: a network drive?
makeshift0546@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Fuck all of this 🤣. It would take so fucking long with that full disk and swapping. I guess that’s a memory haha
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Usually you run it overnight and smile in the morning lol
Dave@lemmy.nz 2 months ago
I still have an HDD, am I supposed to defrag it? I don’t think I’ve ever done that.
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
ptu@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
So it runs automatically in the background?
Dave@lemmy.nz 2 months ago
Oh good thanks 🙂
BigDiction@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I hopelessly did this on Win 98 without a clue what was happening, so why not?
cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’m glad I own a NAS with magnetic hard drives because that disk read/write sound just brings me peace and memories of falling asleep to that sound.
RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 2 months ago
gesshoku@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I remember having to use Norton for that.
ReCursing@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Fortunately life is better now
victorz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh yeah… 🤔😃
muffedtrims@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Image
Fmstrat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Absorb my twin I will.