My game has a very slight stutter, but after I defragment it becomes a pronounced stagger! It clears up as I continue to save and play the game. I thought I was imagining this, but I'd mentioned it to a friend, and he noticed it yesterday.

I defragment(actually use Norton's Speed Disc) almost daily. My friend only defragments every few weeks, so this was his first chance to notice it.

Anyone else...anyone at all?

Defragging everyday is totataly excessive.

All of this extra wear and tair on your hard drive is not worth the minimal gains. Every time you write to the disk you risk damaging sectors.

Defrag one time per month is more than enough even for the avid user.

Second what O.S. are you useing, how much memory do you have and what model hard drive i.e. Seagate Barracuda 18GB 7200RPM IDE. if you are using XP
I would quess your trouble is lack physical memory. If you have 512 memory and wanted to speed up your computer buy a faster hard drive. Ultra160 SCSI if you have the means. This will improve your performace the most after you have enough memory 512MB seems the limit for signifigant gain on a desktop. I run 1GIG and I see a huge difference in disk access.

I'm running XP on a 2gig Dell Dimension 8200 with 256mg rdram(I ordered an additional 256 yesterday), and I just installed a GeForce ti4400 graphics card. Not really sure about the hard drive as far as type, but it's 40gig, and I bought the system less than six months ago.

I've never really heard your point about overdoing the defragmenting, but I'll have to seriuosly consider it.

I still don't understand why it would effect gameplay though. I had thought maybe it was just me, but the same thing happened to my friend. The slight stutter is very exaggerated after a defrag, but smooths out with a few hours of gameplay(or a reinstall).

Weird....

[ 10-01-2002, 12:32 PM: Message edited by: Ronn_Bman ]

Well with xp, I would say the 256 extra ram will minimize swapping enough
that the chop should be eliminated. O.S. like XP try to index frequently used files and load them before they are needed. I am guessing XP uses a sophisticated read ahead casheing system that is upset by your defrag routine.
It takes a couple of hours for XP to "relearn" your file use patterns. This is just a good guess.

Perhaps I will investigate on the net a bit!

No offense but <u>WHY</u> would you need to defragment everyday?!?!?
That just doesn't make sense and there is simply no reason to defrag that often.

I have it set to run at the same time everyday, but it doesn't really get to run everyday. If I'm at work, it's turned off, and if I'm at home, I'm usually playing.

I guess everyday was an overstatement, but according to you guys, I'm still doing it waaaay too much.

Based on the effect it has on NWN, I won't being doing it much at all anymore [img]smile.gif[/img]

That's good to hear cause with WindowsXP, you don't have to defragment nearly as much as with older OS's.

I heard once every 3 months was the norm.

The only reason I'm warning you is that I lost a computer to defragmenting. :(
I had WindowsME and defragging completely destroyed my hard drive.

Thankfully, I was able to replace it for a much better comp with Windows XP! [img]smile.gif[/img]
I've had it for six months and have only defragged three times... and of those times, I only defragged because I wanted to.

to be hoenst, defragging is only necessary if you've installed/uninstalled a fair bit. saved games and temporary internet files also contribute to fragging

maybe once a week. sometimes i leave it a few months but i can let the PC defrag overnight while i kip LOL!!

Have you uninstalled your old video drivers before you loaded the new ones for your new card? It sounds to me like you might have a conflict in drivers. I run 98se with Nortons Utilities. At the end of each day I use Speedisk to defrag and optimize my drive. The difference can be seen in a benchmark (Atto)...before and after...as far as hurting your hard drive...never heard of such a thing! If you have some documentation about defragging the drive,I sure would like to read it! As to SCSI as an option...nope go for Raid...I run two fourty gig harddrives and get the same through put at half the price of SCSI! Two WD 40 jb drives on a Abit motherboard with onboard Raid 0.

Nasty

Yes, I completely uninstalled the old drivers before replacing cards and installing new drivers. I'd noticed the problem before any upgrade though.

Again, this isn't a fluke either. My uncle, who hasn't replaced anything on his machine, noticed the same problem.

I'm running XP and someone earlier mentioned maybe that was the problem with defragging....who knows?

It only takes about 10 minutes to use Norton's Speed Disc on my 40GIG HD.