Memories of defragging your computer

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• muffedtrims@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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  • Fmstrat@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Absorb my twin I will.

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• chunes@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • deltapi@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • paladin235@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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!

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• rethnor@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Then installing Linux and wondering why I didn’t have to do this…

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• homes@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It used to save your hard drive. Now it will destroy your hard drive.

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  • SW42@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Hard drives used to be irony, now SSDs are more Silicony.

    …

    I’ll see myself out.

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    • homes@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      heh

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    • green_goglin@thelemmy.club ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      nice

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  • krisevol@lemmus.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    We’ll we didn’t use harddrives anymore except for storage, so it not really irony. You still need to defrag harddrives today.

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    • CapuccinoCoretto@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.

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• Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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  • folekaule@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Obligatory “I can hear this GIF”

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  • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyz ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    The looping made me look for “Contents modified - Restarting…” 😅

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• serpineslair@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

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• Blackout@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.

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  • vrek@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.

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  • jqubed@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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.

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    • Klear@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      …for a whole day.

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    • Tiral@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • Rubanski@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Oh I just recently replaced Myst. Only outshined by Riven, such a great game.

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    • W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨48⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

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    • kalpol@lemmy.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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    • Dultas@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Blue Prince, while vastly different, did bring up fond memories of those games.

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  • homes@piefed.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ 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

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    • Dultas@lemmy.world ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Needed to run it more frequently and you’d have much shorter cycles.

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• over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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  • deltapi@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’m guessing dummy.bin is a zerofile?

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    • over_clox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

      Yep

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• Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I still have an HDD, am I supposed to defrag it? I don’t think I’ve ever done that.

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  • rumba@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    no

    datarecovery.com/…/why-you-dont-need-to-defrag-ha…

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    • ptu@sopuli.xyz ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      So it runs automatically in the background?

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    • Dave@lemmy.nz ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Oh good thanks 🙂

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  • BigDiction@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I hopelessly did this on Win 98 without a clue what was happening, so why not?

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• vapordays@leminal.space ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  me to gen Z:

  bullshit you dont defrag, you never fucking defragged

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  • wizardfrag@lemmy.world ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Is Gen Z: a network drive?

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• makeshift0546@lemmy.today ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Fuck all of this 🤣. It would take so fucking long with that full disk and swapping. I guess that’s a memory haha

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• qprimed@lemmy.ml ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  not quite neckbeard, but…

  dos tetris (easy mode)

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  • ZC3rr0r@piefed.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• cyberpunk007@lemmy.ca ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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.

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• gesshoku@lemmy.zip ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  defrag98.com

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• RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

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• SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I remember having to use Norton for that.

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• ReCursing@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Fortunately life is better now

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• victorz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Oh yeah… 🤔😃

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