Singdall wrote:
inforce wrote:
Are you joking? Seriously. Your system needs to be defragged like bad.. you must get choppy in your games a lot. defrag, also not defragging can lead to bad sectors and data loss.. so keep on it every month or so. Total fragmentation of like 44% .. i have never seen a hard drive that bad.
Anyways im glad so many people posted!!! It's cool that we have a spot where we can post a few tricks and tips to get everyone running nicely. Thanks for the rate-ups and whoever rated me back down whatever =/ hehe I especially liked reading your mac tips. I'd like to buy a powerbook someday and this stuff helped me a whole lot.
Edited, Oct 5th 2007 9:03pm by inforce
no a fragmented drive should not cause the game to get choppy, but it can cause lost data, crashes, and will/can reduce the overall performance of the file system.
FYI as for never having seen a system at 44% fragemented, have you ever defraged a winXP or 2k rig right after an install? it is between 20 - 50% fragmented from the start.
Windows does a horrid job at allocating proper storage and placement of files and directories on the HDD.
that is why it is the ONLY OS in the world that required degfragmentation.
Nope.. in the 5 years I managed an ISP and an OEM system builder/seller never saw a system remotely fragmented at the start like that. I've seen 1-5% but 40-50% ... something is wrong there.
As far as fragmentation causing a game to be choppy do a search for : "hard drive fragmentation causes game choppiness" in google. The first result is from Age of Empires, the company that made that game, and their official response to that is:
Q. What are some general things I can do to improve performance?
A. There are several things you can do:
Defragment your hard drives. (I wonder why this is #1 on all game manufacturers websites?)
Make sure you have the latest Windows updates.
Verify you have the latest Drivers for your hardware.
Verify you do not have any spyware or viruses.
Turn off other applications running in the background.
Adjust in game graphics settings.
Upgrade your hardware.
I think the same holds true for warcraft even more so. You may not realize it but in order to minimalize the loading to only say instances and new vast continents the game itself is constantly loading, constantly. The reason they say "fragmentation" will cause you to have poor performance i.e. "low frame rates" a.k.a. "choppiness" is because say, the game library needs to find a "level 52 skeletal flayer" and if the disk is
fragmented then the game data might not be in the exact spot it is supposed to be causing a delay in paging time to load the graphic. This produces in-game choppiness.
Fragmentation in a system as further described in the google results also explains that it can cause very slow loading times. A nice freshly defragged disk with all background programs unloaded - that should be unloaded, with the appropriate hardware, should run warcraft just fine. I guess all you play is warcraft. Ever tried to play a graphic intensive game with a badly fragmented system?
More google results: (Just cut and pasted from the actual result page)
Puzzle Pirates Forums - View Thread - How to reduce/eliminate lag ...Defrag your hard drive, or install Y!PP on a different partition. ... Re: How to reduce/eliminate lag and choppy gameplay, Reply to this Post ...
Slow Loading with XP - TechSpot TroubleshootingMy computer often takes *way* too long to load games and runs extremely choppy even when given the simplest instructions/commands in windows. The HardDrive ...
www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-2233-Slow-Loading-with-XP.html - 23k -
In any case a fragmented drive at 40% is a sin. I hope none of you ever let your HD get that bad. I've seen some disks brought into the shop that had complete failure and needed to be wiped because being fragmented caused them to fail. (google fragmented hard drive failure) .. It just sucks. I read somewhere years ago that windows vastly underestimates it's numbers when it reports the fragmentation on the volume. I also read that 3 and 4% are a lot and should be fragmented.
/shrug anyways its your system run it how you want, but defragging is
always a good way to increase some frames and reduce choppies and loading!!
Edited, Oct 6th 2007 1:25am by inforce
