Can any windoze techie types explain this to me please:

I am handing down my lowest end PC to my brother for Xmas (an XP2000 AMD system with ATI 9200SE Gfx and 768Mb RAM).

As I know in advance from previous experience simply transferring his hard drive from his present system (which believe it or not is actually a lot less powerful than the above listed one!) to the new one would likely just cause a huge amount of heartache I instead put a brand new 160Gb HD into his "new" machine and installed XP-Pro (yes I had a copy lying around spare, how sad am I?) from scratch.

All goes well, XP is installed so I install the Gfx driver, Modem driver, Sound drivers, etc etc etc ... So here I am 3 hours later with a system that runs like a 3 legged dog, no correct that a dead 3 legged dog, so I go to tools and do a defrag->analyse (on a disk that reports 156Gb size with 147Gb free) and a few minutes later get back a message telling me it needs defragging with a strange bar graph with a large red blob at one end.

I clicked on the defrag now option, as I got the hint, approximately half an hour ago. Presently it says it is half way through according to the little green bar.

So can anyone please explain why? :dummy:

Did some Microsloth engineer think it would be a really funny joke to have the installer randomly scatter the contents of the CAB files all over the hard drive or is there some valid technical reason for this seemingly lunatic behaviour?

Amen-Moses

What are you asking?

validpretense said:

What are you asking?

Click to expand...

Why a new XP installation fragments my hard drive so badly that it is almost useless. I'm trying to understand how it is even possible to do this!

Amen-Moses

Thats odd I never have had an install frag all over the place. But every windows install I do I install the Os on it's own 30-40gb or so partition.

I never have had that happen so don't know what to say. That is nutz! Brand new install should not be that fragmented.

mac not windows

bad luck

but unless i understood it wrong.

you are asking a MAC forum and WINDOWS question?

how does that work

sorry if i got it wrong

lol
:mac:

alot of the people here are very knowlageable and tend to know about both systems, as long as you are not joining the mac forums to strictly ask windows questions it sometimes makes sense to throw a question up in the air to a community you trust even though its not normally what people are expecting you can sometimes get an answer.
Sorry but on this topic I really don't know on a new install that should not have happened.. probably not 100% windows but partially the hard drive also.

If I were you I would just do the install over. Get a DOS boot disk from "http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm" and than use it to delete everything on that hard drive. When you use those it wipes it much better than the windows installer. Than insert your cd and format the hard drive and install. If that still doesn't work than you may have gotten a defected hard drive.

christm said:

bad luck

but unless i understood it wrong.

you are asking a MAC forum and WINDOWS question?

how does that work

sorry if i got it wrong

lol
:mac:

Click to expand...

From experience I know the people around here are more technically savvy than anywhere else I know of.

Amen-Moses

Hi there,

This is a problem that I had all the time when i was installing windows xp both home and pro versions. The trick is to not to rely on the inbuilt windows defragger. First off it is not very accurate in terms of the vision of the drive it brings up and second it is not particularly effective at speeding up the machine. What i would say is that dependant onwhat it is you are trying to achieve, if you are expecting to speed up the machines gaming performance through defraging then i would personally create a windows only partition and then use a seperate partition for games and music etc...

Another key difference will be down to the way your arrange your files ie fat32 or NTFS. NTFS in my experience does have some key advantages over fat32....

Let us know what you want to achieve and i will help further also i would make sure that you have the most up to date graphics drivers going and do not put sp2 on the machine as that is a real speed killer!

Low level format your HDD.
Then when you boot from CD to install Windows make sure you dont do a quick format.
FAT32 is quicker on older systems then NTFS so try that.

Also you will have a little deframentation what ever you do becuase the CD_ROM and the HDD are not in Sync and the HDD is not going to wait for the DATA from the CD and make sure they are all in sequencial sectors on the HDD and visa versa.

your system should run XP very well and fast from a fresh install. of course once you add Apps and anti virus and so on it will soon start to slow.

I have a Pentium 3 1000Mhz with 256Mb SD Ram that i use as a download machine with nothing else installed except My torrent App. and it runs real fast!! faster then some more modern PCs that are bloated with resource hungry antiviris and firewall apps.

Smartz said:

Hi there,

This is a problem that I had all the time when i was installing windows xp both home and pro versions. The trick is to not to rely on the inbuilt windows defragger. First off it is not very accurate in terms of the vision of the drive it brings up and second it is not particularly effective at speeding up the machine. What i would say is that dependant onwhat it is you are trying to achieve, if you are expecting to speed up the machines gaming performance through defraging then i would personally create a windows only partition and then use a seperate partition for games and music etc...

Another key difference will be down to the way your arrange your files ie fat32 or NTFS. NTFS in my experience does have some key advantages over fat32....

Let us know what you want to achieve and i will help further also i would make sure that you have the most up to date graphics drivers going and do not put sp2 on the machine as that is a real speed killer!

Click to expand...

I assumed that XP-Pro defaulted to NTFS and can't remember it even asking me to choose. I opted for the default option of a single partition basically because the machine was for my brother so I wanted to keep everything simple.

The XP version I used was pre SP2 and was an upgrade version although the HD was brand new and unformatted, when it said it couldn't find an existing OS I put in an old NT 4.5 CD I had hanging around, it seemed satisfied with that.

I installed the latest Gfx drivers for the saphire 9200 SE card downloaded from ATI, I think it was the 5.81 Catalyst driver although I removed the control centre afterwards as that has issues with XP.

Are you saying that the XP default defragger wrongly reports a fragged drive? If so I'm confused as to why it was running like a dog before the defrag but was fine afterwards.

Amen-Moses

macanal said:

Low level format your HDD.
Then when you boot from CD to install Windows make sure you dont do a quick format.
FAT32 is quicker on older systems then NTFS so try that.

Also you will have a little deframentation what ever you do becuase the CD_ROM and the HDD are not in Sync and the HDD is not going to wait for the DATA from the CD and make sure they are all in sequencial sectors on the HDD and visa versa.

your system should run XP very well and fast from a fresh install. of course once you add Apps and anti virus and so on it will soon start to slow.

I have a Pentium 3 1000Mhz with 256Mb SD Ram that i use as a download machine with nothing else installed except My torrent App. and it runs real fast!! faster then some more modern PCs that are bloated with resource hungry antiviris and firewall apps.

Click to expand...

Well I did do a quick format as from previous experience I know that the full version takes hours and I was using a brand new drive. What does windoze do on a "quick" format?

Amen-Moses

Dont do a quick format!!
A quick format only formats the Boot sector.
then when you install a fresh copy of Xp it will create a new boot sector then just install over the top of what you had there already.

if you do a full format it formats the whole drive.

In any case if you PC runs like a Dog after install (your PC is a OK Spec compared tom my PIII) there must be something wrong with the setup (hardware) or a faulty HDD or DVD_rom or something like that

macanal said:

Low level format your HDD.
Then when you boot from CD to install Windows make sure you dont do a quick format.
FAT32 is quicker on older systems then NTFS so try that.

Also you will have a little deframentation what ever you do becuase the CD_ROM and the HDD are not in Sync and the HDD is not going to wait for the DATA from the CD and make sure they are all in sequencial sectors on the HDD and visa versa.

your system should run XP very well and fast from a fresh install. of course once you add Apps and anti virus and so on it will soon start to slow.

I have a Pentium 3 1000Mhz with 256Mb SD Ram that i use as a download machine with nothing else installed except My torrent App. and it runs real fast!! faster then some more modern PCs that are bloated with resource hungry antiviris and firewall apps.

Click to expand...

DO NOT, under any circumstances do a LOW-LEVEL format - this can completely render the drive inoperative. A low level format should only be done as a very, very last resort if it is diagnosed that the harddrive is having severe problems.

However, do choose to carry out a FULL format, (not quick format) Did you create a new partition by pressing c before installing the Operating system? If you do not manually create it win XP creates it and it does tend to fragment and slow things down.

Was there anything on that drive before you installed Windows? I would boot from the Windows install CD, delete all partitions and create new ones. Then do a full format in NTFS. I have never seen that happen before, and I have installed ALOT of Windows in my days

ISD said:

Was there anything on that drive before you installed Windows? I would boot from the Windows install CD, delete all partitions and create new ones. Then do a full format in NTFS. I have never seen that happen before, and I have installed ALOT of Windows in my days

Click to expand...

Brand new unformatted drive.

The machine is in my brothers care now I just wondered if anyone knew a technical reason for this behaviour.

Amen-Moses