Defragment.....??

[Mino]

Just wondering how often you people defragment your hard drives. With all the heavy duty creative work done on most of our machines I'm wondering if people are paying attention to this computer health issue.

[Frizzle Fry]

I defragment my production drive:

1. Before and after capturing
2. Before (usually) and after (always) rendering

Every two weeks if not capturing or rendering video, along with my boot drive. I would recommend a third party defrag program. And I never, ever, no matter what, use any software written by Symantec.

[disjecta]

I have a macro that defrags my computer every night at 2am.

[dakotapod]

I do all drives Weekly

[Mino]

Wow...You guys are on top of it. Why no symantec stuff Frizzle?

[HorseFilms]

Once every three years whether they need it or not! ;)

[Isaac_Brody]

Frizzle, what third party defragger do you recommend? And why don't you recommend Symantec? I'm using Norton Systemworks, which is why I'm curious. It's incredibly slow to defrag and wouldn't mind something faster.

[veidog]

[quote author=disjecta link=board=Offtopic;num=1106925304;start=0#2 date=01/28/05 at 08:03:50]I have a macro that defrags my computer every night at 2am.[/quote]
Hey disjecta, how did you set up that macro. I would like to do that also.

[Kirk Gillock]

What's defragment?

;D

Ok, Mark's avatar is making me sick. I was about to sleep, but now I'm unable too. :'(

[disjecta]

Here's how to set up a macro on a Windows machine to automatically schedule a defragmentation of drives of your choosing:

Open up notepad and type the following:

defrag x:

That's all you have to type, where "x" is the name of the drive you want defragmented. You can choose to defrag more than one drive by doing the following:

defrag x:
defrag y:
defrag z:

Just fill in the actual drive letters that are appropriate on your computer.

Next, save the file as: defragall.cmd

Save it somewhere you can access easily like the c root directory, for instance.

Next go to CONTROL PANEL->Scheduled Tasks

Click on Add Scheduled Task. Click NEXT in the wizard, then BROWSE. Browse to the file you just created. Click OPEN and this will ask you to name the task and you can choose exactly how you would like to schedule this task.

Click DAILY and then NEXT. Choose a time and start date. Click NEXT. Create a username and password for this task. Click NEXT. Leave the box unchecked and hit the FINISH button and, voila, you are done and your computer will defrag all the drives you selected at the specified time and you won't have to worry about it after that.