About 5 weeks ago I decided to try an experiment that was recommended by a reader. The basic was to defrag my system and than not to do any defragging for one month. Right after I decided to try this experiement I received a free evaluation copy courtesy of Diskeeper who provided me with a free copy of Diskeeper Pro Premier 2009 to try on my Vista laptop, which I used for the experiment.

My laptop is used through out the day for blogging, searching out sites and for playing with a variety of different softwares to test and review. So on about February 15th, 2009 I defragged by system using the Diskeeper product I mentioned above and did so for 5 days straight. On or about February 20th, 2009 I stopped defragging to see what would happen.

For the frist few weeks I didn’t notice much at all happening or I may not have been watching what was happening. But it was last week that I noticed a few things. I was going into Accessories – System Tools – System Information and I sat staring at an hour glass for about 10 seconds before anything came up. Strange I thought. When I opened some doc’s, same time warp but under 10 seconds and not so severe as above. This is when I noticed that even returning from hibernation also seemed slow. Was it my perception or were things really slowing down? A few more experiments and yes, things were slow. I finished out the remainder to my time and than defragged this morning.

All is once again well. Documents open quickly and I just tried system information and it came up immediately.

Does defragging really help a computer system? I believe it does but your mileage may vary.

Comments welcome.