How Defragmentation Made my Day

So I purchased my Alienware M11x about 2 months ago. It is a great machine and was worth buying. I couldn’t wait to download and test some games on it. For this example I am going to be using the game Just Cause 2 which I bought just after I received the M11x. After I had installed my most used programs like Zune, Firefox, Chrome and many more, I was getting around 15-30fps on Just Case 2 while the laptop was over clocked to 1.7ghz.

Little did I know that my disk was over 10% fragmented as revealed from statistics in backups. Over the next month or so, the disk got more and more fragmented as hard drives do when being used. Gradually, Just Cause 2 ran at as little as 5-10-fps. Very recently I discovered that my hard drive was 67% fragmented. This is 57% over the recommended time to defragment it. I immediately used the default Windows application to defragment the hard drive. Around the same time I removed lots of my excess applications.

I booted up Just Cause 2 and I got a constant 50-60fps. This is much higher than I have ever got on the M11x. The bottom line of this little tale is to make sure your hard drive is defragmented (unless you have a solid state drive). Yes, I know, it’s not very “geek-like” to not defragment your hard drive every week but I have learned my lesson. I’m pretty sure this is why my desktop computer runs so slow as well…

On a side note, I’m back in America so make sure you check www.youtube.com/omnitechnews because I will be doing some more videos very soon.