'defrag'ing tooo often....?

Psykicpup

I have recently downloaded an online game (VV3) & love it but EVERY time I play I have to defrag or my PC is sooo slow it practically useless!
Any idea what might be causing this & how I can stop it? I was wondering about partioning the drive & giving VV3 its own space to muck -up lol but seems a bit extreme .....
ps - I'm not very computor savvy but understand a bit so be gentle

let me know if what info about the PC you need if any..

superscaper

Which game is it? Only thing I can think of is Virtual Villagers 3 (playing it myself at the moment, got it through steam). But if it is that it's only 50 MiB and shouldn't be causing you any problems with your hard drive fragmenting. What are the general specs of your pc? Also where did you get the game?

Psykicpup

Thanks Superscraper
It is indeed Virtual Villagers & I downloaded from the main site after the demo which caused no probs...
When you say general specs what exactly do you mean.....
its an AMD duron..

superscaper

Psykicpup wrote: »

Thanks Superscraper
It is indeed Virtual Villagers & I downloaded from the main site after the demo which caused no probs...
When you say general specs what exactly do you mean.....
its an AMD duron..

What about hard drive size. I presume you've got plenty of space. What security do you use? Anti virus etc. It may be worth "cleaning" your system first just to make sure there's no nasties on there. My machine is relatively low spec but not noticed any problems running VV3 which makes me think there may be something else going on.

cwp500

You dont mention what anti virus, anti spyware, firewall, or other protection software you are using. If none, you need AVG antivirus, Spybot, Lavasoft adaware, Spyware Blaster and a decent registry repair programe like CCleaner.
The above are all free! and very thorough and easy to use.

Defragging shouldnt be so necessary as frequently as you imply. It might be worthwhile running a disk check. Go to my computer. right click C drive. look at Properties and then the Tools tab.

Run the diskcheck from there. Do this check every fortnight; you will be surprised how untidy the files get in a very short space of time, particularly if someone is abusing the computer.

Give it a go.

Psykicpup

just checked back - I will try to log in tommorrow to answer as many questions as I can... sorry realy tired now tonight..- would a PM with screenprints of my system info help as I dont know whats relevant!

I also asked on the VV3 site & its possible the anti-virus I use was having a greedy time at the same time as I play so I may try rescheduling that ..lol

Superscraper ..how do I know the hard drive size ? (& as I said would a screenie help as I use Tune-up & all info clearly there but cant copy....)

JethroTull_2

If you don't want to bother with defragging frequently, you can look into automatic defragmenters. Very convenient, and there is no need to schedule..defrag is done transparently and automatically in real-time according to available system resources. You can google for "fully automatic defragmenter" for more info.

As for anti-virus software, I find that AVG 8 Free exhibits a good balance of resource usage and effectiveness.

Psykicpup

Im currently running AVG free 7.5 I think but hope to upgrade to the paid for version come payday. I also have Spybot & an adaware type programme but not had much need with the spybot running. I'm using the windows firewall (sorry I know hence whating to upgrade AVG):rolleyes:
I also use Tune-up utilities which does all the other maintenance stuff such as cleaning the drives etc as well as a once a month manual windows clean before the regular defrag I do - love tune-up does what it says on the tin :A
When I check that for drive usage it says...76.31GB used 21.39GB (28%) free 54.93GB (72%)
Or if I go to memory....total physical memory 1,280MB total windows memory 3694MB ...free 2699MB used 995MB

My son defraged 3 times the day I posted here :eek: & since then I havent had as much of a problem - he did that as we couldnt get the PC to connect to the internet to update AVG as it was so slow, not sure if that helped or was just co-incidence lol
I am begining to suspect that the slowness etc was mostly co-incidence with downloading the game although it does seem to affect the pc a bit (note to self - buy that other stick of Ram as well as upgrade AVG)

Psykicpup

Just been surfing through the rest of the board & found this - think this says it all really - can you guess which version I'm really using lol

01-05-2008, 12:23 PM #11 cirrus18 vbmenu_register("postmenu_10612161", true);

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Seems that people are having trouble with AVG 8.0 perhaps you should read this before installing it.

http://www.tipandtrick.net/2008/inte...alling-avg-80/

After installing AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 or AVG Internet Security 8.0, the Internet network connection significantly slowdown. Browsing and surfing Internet web pages and websites using Internet Explorer (IE such as IE7) or Firefox web browser, the speed slow to a crawl. Intermittently (actually is frequently), web browser can’t even connect to websites or web servers, [...]