Should I or shouldn't I?

Hi. I hope I'm posting this in the right place.

My computer isn't running slow, or anything, but I often get kicked off the net. It's rather annoying! rolleyes
I've thought about defragging, but I'm not sure if it's the right thing to do. I've heard that by doing that, you can lose stuff on your computer, & I don't want that. I'm running AVG, and do the scans/updates, as well as Windows updates.
I've read about using the ones mentioned on here, as the Microsoft one sucks, so, I'd def. use one of those.

Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.

 

Hi. Thanks for replying.

I'll be on a site, like Facebook, in the middle of doing something then it goes kinda slower, like it's pausing, then I get the little circle saying loading, then I get kicked off the net, with a prompt to log back on.

 

Defragging a modern Windows operating system is pretty much useless.

 

Why do you say that?

 

There have been countless articles written on the "value", not so much, of defragging.

With the speed of the current disk devices and their ability to cache data, the value of defragging is questionable. Certainly something to consider considering the risk of moving all the data on your hard drive for some anticipated and very subjective performance gain.

 

Hmm, with hard drives *still* being the slowest part of a computer by a very large margin, I like to do a cleanup and defrag at least 2x per month; try playing a game with a 1GB+ pk file in 30+ fragments or loading Outlook with a big fragmented PST, then defrag and see the difference - no stopwatch needed.

Only once in many hundreds, probably thousands, of defrags have I ever come across a scenario where defrag *may* have caused any damage to my data - I've seen Microsoft partitioning tools, Scandsk and Chkdsk all cause more damage, even *complete* data loss, several times; anyway, that's why we create backups, for those rare and unexpected ocassions, isn't it?

 

Your choice to do what you like. That's why they call them personal computers. I stopped using defrag after Windows 95. I am not a gamer so I can't speak to that, but I would imagine increasing the disk cache would yield far better disk access results.....and be permanent.