Then installing Linux and wondering why I didn't have to do this...
this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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This is me reloading the dishwasher after someone tries to help
Back in 1995, my family got our first computer, and despite being a kid at the time, computer maintenance fell in my lap because I quickly became the most tech-savvy person in the household.
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. He also blamed my problem on this, of course.
So yeah, that's my defrag story I guess.
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.
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!
The looping made me look for "Contents modified - Restarting..." 😅
Obligatory "I can hear this GIF"
Absorb my twin I will.
me to gen Z:
bullshit you dont defrag, you never fucking defragged
Is Gen Z: a network drive?
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.
I'm guessing dummy.bin is a zerofile?
Yep
I still have an HDD, am I supposed to defrag it? I don't think I've ever done that.
So it runs automatically in the background?
If you're running NVME or SSD, you don't have to worry about fragmentation at all and neither will NTFS or Windows.
On rotational media, recent versions of windows do it when it needs it. NTFS itself has become better about not splitting up files when there's contiguous space available.
I have two 10 terabyte external hard drives that go whirr (so I assume there are platters in there). Do they need a defrag? I'm running Windows 11.
Oh good thanks 🙂
It has nothing to do with the type of media and everything to do with the file system being used by Windows, FAT.
I hopelessly did this on Win 98 without a clue what was happening, so why not?
It used to save your hard drive. Now it will destroy your hard drive.
Does this count as an historical irony?
Hard drives used to be irony, now SSDs are more Silicony.
…
I’ll see myself out.
heh
nice
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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.
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.
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.
...for a whole day.
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.
Oh I just recently replayed Myst. Only outshined by Riven, such a great game.
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.
I also have my OG 5 disk set but I recently replayed it in VR. Man, what a ride! Yes, the last puzzle was maybe the most difficult puzzle in videogame history haha
Blue Prince, while vastly different, did bring up fond memories of those games.
Wishlisted!
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
Needed to run it more frequently and you'd have much shorter cycles.
Fuck all of this 🤣. It would take so fucking long with that full disk and swapping. I guess that's a memory haha
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.
not quite neckbeard, but...
dos tetris (easy mode)
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.
I remember having to use Norton for that.
Fortunately life is better now
Oh yeah... 🤔😃
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