Defrag test

There's been a few messages about what defrag does if anything. I was
playing with it a bit trying to see if it actually did anything and couldn't
come up with a test that was conclusive one way or another. That was last
night. Previously I had noticed that exiting a newsgroup with many thousands
of posts (like vista.general) would take up to 30 seconds and sometimes lock
up. Today it's much faster (maybe 10 seconds) and no lockups. I haven't
really looked at the Windows Mail store but I understand the messages are
stored as individual files. The largest files I can find in the store are I
think to do with the JET database with the largest being 16 MB. I don't see
how a defrag would have speeded this up unless the program was somewhat
intelligent, recognized the email store, and defragged the folder as a unit.
Am I off base or is the speed increase in Windows Mail a happy coincidence?

--
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Shell/User
www.VistaHelp.ca

I think the defrag would help. Defrag should know about mail stores by this
time. It's been around long enough.

"Kerry Brown" <kerry@kdbNOSPAMsys-tems.c*a*m> wrote in message
news:%239JM03toGHA.4848@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...

> There's been a few messages about what defrag does if anything. I was
> playing with it a bit trying to see if it actually did anything and
> couldn't come up with a test that was conclusive one way or another. That
> was last night. Previously I had noticed that exiting a newsgroup with
> many thousands of posts (like vista.general) would take up to 30 seconds
> and sometimes lock up. Today it's much faster (maybe 10 seconds) and no
> lockups. I haven't really looked at the Windows Mail store but I
> understand the messages are stored as individual files. The largest files
> I can find in the store are I think to do with the JET database with the
> largest being 16 MB. I don't see how a defrag would have speeded this up
> unless the program was somewhat intelligent, recognized the email store,
> and defragged the folder as a unit. Am I off base or is the speed increase
> in Windows Mail a happy coincidence?
>
> --
> Kerry Brown
> MS-MVP - Windows Shell/User
> www.VistaHelp.ca
>
>
>

Kerry--

Good info on what defraggers do and how to test is at www.diskeeper.com and
www.raxco.com in their Knowledge Bases and other info files. There are also
comparison tables with XP on Diskeeper's (Executive Soft's site).

Any defragger that comes with a Windows OS is going to be analagous to a kid
playing T-Ball and someone like Alex Rodriguez or Chipper Jones when they
are hitting.

Win mail uses a new storage format that replaces .dbx and it's called .eml


In XP it's:
The Windows mail store is in on)
Documents and Settings
Username (your username)
Application Data
Identities
GUID Identifier (random string like {3B0FA092-2222-1111-A1B2-111A1AA1AAA11}
Microsoft
Outlook Express


In Vista it's:
Whatever Drive\Users\Your Profile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail and
since it's blue you need to show hidden windows files. Go to control folders
in run box>view to do that.

I don't know a decent defragger's impact on your Win Mail stores and Perfect
Disk and Diskeeper can be used to show what is impacted and what files are
skipped over for various reasons that their sites give.

One important point besides that 1) Defrag is instrumental for speed and I'd
do it a few times a week 2) Defrag from Diskeeper and Perfect Disk is light
years better than what MSFT uses (in XP they had Exec Soft maker of
Diskeeper make their watered down defragger) is that with Perfect Disk you
should have 5% free space for the defragger to be competent and with
Diskeeper or whatever company's MSFT is using in Vista, you should have 15%
or higher of free space.

CH


"Kerry Brown" <kerry@kdbNOSPAMsys-tems.c*a*m> wrote in message
news:%239JM03toGHA.4848@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...

> There's been a few messages about what defrag does if anything. I was
> playing with it a bit trying to see if it actually did anything and
> couldn't come up with a test that was conclusive one way or another. That
> was last night. Previously I had noticed that exiting a newsgroup with
> many thousands of posts (like vista.general) would take up to 30 seconds
> and sometimes lock up. Today it's much faster (maybe 10 seconds) and no
> lockups. I haven't really looked at the Windows Mail store but I
> understand the messages are stored as individual files. The largest files
> I can find in the store are I think to do with the JET database with the
> largest being 16 MB. I don't see how a defrag would have speeded this up
> unless the program was somewhat intelligent, recognized the email store,
> and defragged the folder as a unit. Am I off base or is the speed increase
> in Windows Mail a happy coincidence?
>
> --
> Kerry Brown
> MS-MVP - Windows Shell/User
> www.VistaHelp.ca
>
>
>

I use Raxco software myself. It's excellent and works exactly as they claim.
I somewhat disagree with you on the frequency of defragging. For normal
users they won't notice any difference defragging NTFS partitions more than
once a month or so. I have tested PerfectDisk against the built in defrag in
XP on my everyday machine and on a SBS 2003 server. There is a difference
between them and defragging once a week does make a slight difference. The
difference was measurable but insignificant for normal use on the daily use
machine. On the server the Raxco software made a bigger difference. I
recommend most users to leave defrag alone unless they are experiencing a
problem or slowdown that they think a defrag may fix. Defrag does a lot of
read/writes, Murphy is always lurking in the background, and most people
don't have proper backups. The potential data loss outweighs the potential
performance gains for most users. If you have specialized needs like a
server I highly recommend Raxco products. I have very little experience with
with Diskeeper other than to try the trial. It seemed to work as advertised
but I didn't use it in a real world situation. For most users the built in
defrag is more than good enough.

Windows Mail uses .nws files as well as .eml files although they are
essentially the same. I like the idea of the new email store but so far it
is light years behind OE in performance. Hopefully by the time the RTM is
ready the performance will be acceptable. I spend a fair amount of time
fixing corrupted OE databases. It seems people like to keep all their sent
emails forever. If they send a lot of attachments sooner or later OE barfs.
The new database format will hopefully fix that.

--
Kerry Brown
MS-MVP - Windows Shell/User
www.VistaHelp.ca



"Chad Harris" <Bushisamoron.net> wrote in message
news:ebk2LRuoGHA.1600@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...

> Kerry--
>
> Good info on what defraggers do and how to test is at www.diskeeper.com
> and www.raxco.com in their Knowledge Bases and other info files. There
> are also comparison tables with XP on Diskeeper's (Executive Soft's site).
>
> Any defragger that comes with a Windows OS is going to be analagous to a
> kid playing T-Ball and someone like Alex Rodriguez or Chipper Jones when
> they are hitting.
>
> Win mail uses a new storage format that replaces .dbx and it's called .eml
>
>
> In XP it's:
> The Windows mail store is in on)
> Documents and Settings
> Username (your username)
> Application Data
> Identities
> GUID Identifier (random string like
> {3B0FA092-2222-1111-A1B2-111A1AA1AAA11}
> Microsoft
> Outlook Express
>
>
> In Vista it's:
> Whatever Drive\Users\Your Profile\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Mail and
> since it's blue you need to show hidden windows files. Go to control
> folders in run box>view to do that.
>
> I don't know a decent defragger's impact on your Win Mail stores and
> Perfect Disk and Diskeeper can be used to show what is impacted and what
> files are skipped over for various reasons that their sites give.
>
> One important point besides that 1) Defrag is instrumental for speed and
> I'd do it a few times a week 2) Defrag from Diskeeper and Perfect Disk is
> light years better than what MSFT uses (in XP they had Exec Soft maker of
> Diskeeper make their watered down defragger) is that with Perfect Disk you
> should have 5% free space for the defragger to be competent and with
> Diskeeper or whatever company's MSFT is using in Vista, you should have
> 15% or higher of free space.
>
> CH
>
>
> "Kerry Brown" <kerry@kdbNOSPAMsys-tems.c*a*m> wrote in message
> news:%239JM03toGHA.4848@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...

>
>

NTFS is a journalling file system and doesn't need to be constantly
defragged except in rare circumstances. As per the home user, most drives
these days are so fast that some defragmentation isn't even noticed.


Kerry Brown wrote:

In a testing scenario with lots of installing and uninstalling fragmentation
is much more severe. Monthly might work for production use, but might not
for testing.

"Kerry Brown" <kerry@kdbNOSPAMsys-tems.c*a*m> wrote in message
news:uX3Q5ouoGHA.148@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...

>I use Raxco software myself. It's excellent and works exactly as they
>claim. I somewhat disagree with you on the frequency of defragging. For
>normal users they won't notice any difference defragging NTFS partitions
>more than once a month or so. I have tested PerfectDisk against the built
>in defrag in XP on my everyday machine and on a SBS 2003 server. There is a
>difference between them and defragging once a week does make a slight
>difference. The difference was measurable but insignificant for normal use
>on the daily use machine. On the server the Raxco software made a bigger
>difference. I recommend most users to leave defrag alone unless they are
>experiencing a problem or slowdown that they think a defrag may fix. Defrag
>does a lot of read/writes, Murphy is always lurking in the background, and
>most people don't have proper backups. The potential data loss outweighs
>the potential performance gains for most users. If you have specialized
>needs like a server I highly recommend Raxco products. I have very little
>experience with with Diskeeper other than to try the trial. It seemed to
>work as advertised but I didn't use it in a real world situation. For most
>users the built in defrag is more than good enough.
>
> Windows Mail uses .nws files as well as .eml files although they are
> essentially the same. I like the idea of the new email store but so far it
> is light years behind OE in performance. Hopefully by the time the RTM is
> ready the performance will be acceptable. I spend a fair amount of time
> fixing corrupted OE databases. It seems people like to keep all their sent
> emails forever. If they send a lot of attachments sooner or later OE
> barfs. The new database format will hopefully fix that.
>
> --
> Kerry Brown
> MS-MVP - Windows Shell/User
> www.VistaHelp.ca
>
>
>
> "Chad Harris" <Bushisamoron.net> wrote in message
> news:ebk2LRuoGHA.1600@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...

>

If you want a lot of file fragments in a short time I'd recommend a p2p
program like Shareazar. Just set it to download about 20 largish video
files and within 24 hours you will have thousands of file fragments. I
don't think this will not slow down the performance of anything except
the final bringing together of the fragments for each of those files but
it is good to see how fast the defragger of your choice can perform.
Before defragging turn off Shareazar.