Do you want to hear something interesting? I mean really interesting?

Sometimes I relax by running defrag in full-screen mode so I can see all the little clusters being cleverly redisposed. And I've noticed that they often form patterns. A lot of the blank clusters seem to have formed themselves into distinct columns. This cannot be explained as randomness or coincidence.

Insights into this world-shattering phenomenon would be appreciated!

First let me say,,,,,that using the Defrag from Windows ME, will do just as good a job as the one from 98 or 98/SE and do it much faster. I've been using that for years and sharing it with all my 98 and 98/SE users (customers).
Check this site for a better explanation and a link to download ME's defrag.exe
http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/tec060902.html

You will usually see those patterns if you defrag after deleting large files or groups of files.
You only see the holes, not data, in patterns.

There's NO explaining why windows stores data on the HD the way it does.
But just thank God, it works as well as it does.

Cheers Mate!
Andromeda

I am not a newbie but I would like a decent explanation : Why is ME defrag faster (10x u've said) than 98se one... Anybody?

As a rule of thumb, you may want to ignore Andromeda's posts as they most often appear to be pure drivel coated by affirmations of his own expertise.

ME defrag is reputedly faster than the 98SE one but it it still very slow IMO. Certainly it is not 10 times faster. And if it's faster by some amount, it is certainly because it's code has been optimized.

If you want something that defrags fast, get Diskeeper Lite from a download site. It is much faster than the ME one and by very much. It also has the big advantage of letting you defrag drives on which write operations are carried out by the OS or applications, so it never needs to restart because something has changed on the drive and you never need to go in safe mode to defrag a drive such as the one on which the OS is installed.

Hello, y'all :



"An Introduction to DOS FAT Volumes and File Structure":
http://www.seas.ucla.edu/classes/mkampe/cs...5/docs/dos.html

Simply put, a Directory/File is a "chained string of clusters" pointed to by the Parent Directory. Once allocated, they are unavailable until deleted. Once deleted, they are unavailable until another program completelely frees them (e.g. by a defragger, which resets the bits). The defragger "shuffles" the used (i.e. not-deleted) clusters toward the front of the partition, overlaying "flagged as deleted", then resets all of clusters at the end of the partition (only those that were "shuffled" to the front) to "free".



The MS methodology for storing data on FAT is not very good. Take it from a Mainframe programmer. And the code for defragging using older MS DEFRAG as opposed to the WinME DEFRAG was also not so good. MS simply "revamped" the older DEFRAG for WinME, so it would be more efficient. And it is!

Could a better methodology been used? Yes! Could the code have been written better in the first place? Yes! MS has timetables to push out their operating systems, so programmers never really have time to do a better job of coding. This has also been my experience: "If a newer product is being developed, then why bother to make the older product better? Just patch it and save the manpower!"

Get a third-party defragger? If you want to pay to get even more efficient code, then yes by all means!

Or... convince MS to come up with a very good storage methodology that would completely eliminate the need for defraggers!!! And do it in Assembler (THE most efficient since it is Machine Language)!!!

I also relax sometimes (not often I must say) in font of the old defag.

On my HD there are often "stairs" patterns. Sometimes repeated on a large area (about one hundred of the same conbination of 3 stairs of 5 or 10 clusters each).
This happens when I compress viddo and delete the uncompressed movie.

Sometimes there is one or two block lost in a huge white area...

Why do you personally attack individuals?, the chap gave his own valid opinion. You have done this before reporting other people patching signed/unsigned integers, and predicting the end of this os. What is wrong with you,do you get some power trip from it.
If you are anything that you portray yourself to be, roll out some wdms for latter day hardware or start patching the os for 64bit.
If you having nothing constructive to say, say nothing

Thanks Oscar,
I work at least a dozen or more forums, trying the best I can with my mere 27 years of PC experience, to be of some help, assistance or at least consolation to those in need.

For the most part, I'm pretty well respected all across the internet and worldwide. I'm even a Global Moderator on one very well respected forum.

However, when I come to THIS forum, I know dang'd well I'm going to get flamed or bad-mouthed by some a-hole or another and the so-called Admins won't do a dang'd thing about it.

As for the ME defrag. It WAS revamped or whatever you may want to call it. It looks the same as the 98 Defrag, but actually is about 50 bytes smaller and DOES run faster. I've always suspected that they cut out some redundancy in the program. Whether it's truly 10x faster on everyones PC or not is up for discussion. I always ran "End It ALL" (to shut down all running programs) before doing my system maintenance, so Defrag had full use of the CPU and Ram without having to compete with other programs.
That alone can make a big difference on how efficiently any program like Defrag or a CD Burning program will run.
As they say in the Automobile industry, "your mileage may vary".

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?

This chap as you say did not give an opinion. He made again a totally wrong "expert" assessment. Shall I change the first sentence of my post to : "As usual Andromeda does not seem to know what he speaks about despite his repeated claims of expertise" so that it says the same thing while looking less agressive ?

Last time, his previous post , he expertly and seriously claimed being able to exchange data at 1.5GB/s between two IDE drives he plugged on a SATA adapter card, which is nonsense. I answered that without attacking him but he never came back to discuss the point. So this time, I decided to be a bit agressive as to try to trigger an answer from him.

The point is that I am reading this 9x forum regularly and I got very fed up with Andromeda's posts in general.

For me he is a typical compulsory bluffer, constantly inflating and distording the value of what he's got in his hand.

Now see what he writes in answer :


Maybe there is a valid reason for it, isnt'it ?

And why does he even bother posting on MSFN anymore if all he encounters is as****** flaming him and admins not giving a s*** about it ?

I'll tell you something, we've got the same type of bluffers at the White House and at Downing Street and they also share with Andromeda the fact that they constantly project themselves as benevolent fatherly figures while pushing forward their wrong or distorded data as hard facts. I am pretty sure that andromeda's customers, if he actually has any, are ending up very sorry after a few years in his hands. Fortunately he has not the ability, unlike the above two, to force "fixes" in other people's systems.

And both Andromeda and the above quoted politicians bluff while projecting themselves as benevolent fatherly figures solely to to feed a Power Trip they are in IMO. Amazing isnt'it ?


I think you should have your brain examined as I have never discussed or even read stuff about signed/unsigned integers on here as far as I can remember, nor have I ever predicted the end of this OS.

But maybe you refer to a row I had with LLXX some time before she got banned. If she would have listened, then maybe she'll be still on here instead of getting herself banned for certainly doing the same type of things in other parts of the forum I do not read regularly.

If you refer to something else, please be more precise so that I might eventually remember an episode I have forgotten and eventually accept blame for it if it is well founded.


Weren't the last two thirds of my post constructive ? Yes or No ?

Guys [and girls],

Need to chill out a lil.
And no insults, flames, ok?

If you care to duke it out, please do so outside MSFN forums.

Best wishes.

Will Contig work on 98? If so, perhaps Contig in collaboration with Power Defragmenter will help you defragment a lot faster: http://vistarewired.com/2007/02/15/defragment/

no, tap52384. Contig and Power Defrag require a minimum of Win2k
WinME defrag is good enough for Win95/98 IMHO