• chunes@lemmy.world
    12·
    11 hours ago

    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.

    • deltapi@lemmy.world
      3·
      3 hours ago

      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.

    • paladin235@lemmy.world
      7·
      11 hours ago

      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!

  • over_clox@lemmy.world
    7·
    16 hours ago

    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.

  • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
    4·
    16 hours ago

    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.