No, I’m not blogging about the upcoming Fraggle Rock: The Movie, which will probably be awesome. What I’m writing is WAY too geeky for Fraggles. If a Fraggle read this post, it would blow up. Fraggles are very Fragile.
If you use Microsoft Outlook in a corporate setting (ie, with an Exchange Server), and you have a LOT of email on the server, as in multiple gigabytes, AND you use Cached Exchange Mode, this post might be helpful to you. If you’re a geek and like to know how some things work under the surface, this post might be helpful to you. If you need help sleeping at night, and would like something to print out and read so you can actually get to sleep, this post might be helpful to you.
The plain truth is that although “defragging your hard drive” is way overrused as a troubleshooting step or performance tweak, there actually are times that it can be useful. In this post, I go into the more targeted use of defrag tools and when I’ve found defragging to actually be helpful.
If your computer is running slower than normal all of a sudden, and your local geek wannabe tells you to defrag your hard drive as one of the first things you do, you can tell him/her that that would just be wasting your time. There are times, however, like when you’ve filled up your hard drive all the way and also are working on big files, that may make defragging your drive in important step, but most slowdown problems now-adays are either due to spyware, viruses, or bugs. You can take steps to determine what’s eating up the performance on your Windows XP box, but it probably won’t be a defrag that fixes the problem.
Recently I’ve had a number of performance problems on my Windows XP machine, and most of the issues were Outlook-related. When Outlook was doing it’s thing – send/receive, sync, opening up email windows, etc – it basically locked up the whole machine for a few seconds. My eventual “fix” was to uninstall Office 2007 and re-install, with a service pack that fixes a key problem with large PST/OST files, but one of the steps I took along the way was to defrag my Outlook OST file. This can help tremendously when you A) don’t want to rebuild the OST from scratch over VPN and B) don’t want to defrag the entire drive.
More details are included in the extended entry, below. Read them Live free or die.
