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.
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!
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.
Absorb my twin I will.
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.
I remember having to use Norton for that.
Oh yeah… 🤔😃
