New Dell Inspiron Keeps on Fragmenting Disc

ondablade

Hi all, I've just registered on the advice of friend. I'd very much appreciate some help. Please excuse the length.
I bought a new Dell Inspiron 8200 with XP Home loaded last Autumn, and immediately loaded an XP Professional upgrade and started using it. It's running Office XP Developer and Project, and not a lot else of note from new other than Norton System Works which I've had great results from on on other machines. I installed Palm desktop and other realted SW last month.
I immediately found that the laptop would run fine for a period, but that after a day or two or up to a week the disc would suddenly become close to 10% fragmented. It would then slow right down and become prone to crashing and glitches.
I got fed up running defrag and called Dell who lost interest once they discovered I'd installed XP Prof.
I found by the way that the Norton defrag untility was struggling to finish the defrag process and switched to using the Windows version.
Based on advice I reinstalled the XP Professional over the original with no effect. I then uninstalled XP and installed XP professional from scratch with no luck - it was clearly different to the original install in that judging by some changes in page formats the upgrade may have chosen to use some of the original XP Home files.
The frequency with which the episodes leading to heavy fragmentation occurred seemed to increase as time went on - by now it's worsened to the point where its happening several times a day. There seems to be quite lot of a shuffling of the hard drive going on as well - it intermittently runs quite a lot and then settles again. (AdAware recently got rid of something which was causing this much more frequently than is the case now)
I phoned Dell again and got more serious as a knowledgeable friend in the US had said it was possible I had a hardware problem. They eventually had me run ran a Dell utility during boot which delivered a clean result - I can't rememeber what it was called but they were insistent that this proved I had no hardware problem.
At this stage I again turned to software and went the next step of reformatting the disc and reinstalling all the software - a huge job because I had to redownload all of the Windows updates again as well. It ran very well for a week or so but no change on fragmentation.
I then got wind of the fact that some of these information sniffing programs (worms) that load on to your machine from the internet to shunt back data to the mailing houses can apparently cause this sort of problem. I installed Ad Aware, it stripped out a few programs but again no noted impact on fragmentation rates.
I finally installed an automatic defrag ubtility called Diskeeper last month which keeps the machine running very well, but the problem is still there. Running Internet Explorer seems to cause particular problems, the it can end up running every half an hour or so. This is for real, the System Works defrag monitor shows levels approaching 10% at this stage.
The Windows, disc and other checking utilities System Works uses have never shown up any other problem, but they have on an ongoing basis found a very high incidence of dead shortcuts which seems to happen at times of high disc fragmentation. It also from time to time finds registry errors and fixes them, these have on occasion been the cause of glitching and may be related to the occurrence of the high fragmentation levels.

I guess I've several issues:
1. What's causing the fragmentation?
2. Why does the machine struggle so badly at 10% fragmentation - my old 450 MHZ desk machine on WIN 98 is only slightly affected in this situation.
3. Why is the machine so slow anyway? It's a 1750 MHz with lots of RAM but on XP it's slower than the above now pretty ancient desk machine even when fully defragged - it runs fine, but it's nothing like as crisp.
4. Is there something of a shortcut about the Inspiron design compared to say a Latitude which costs more for a given basic spec. - I gather Dell won't support an Inspiron on a network under a company maintenance contract.

I guess the worst case is that the laptop may have had a hardware problem from new - if so I need ammo to get back to Dell. I'm also a bit suspicious that I may have an advertising worm which AdAware has not removed as I've been showered with a staedily increasing level of spam.
All help appreciated. Thanks in advance.

SickBoy

I have the same notebook and I don't find it slow at all.
The only thing I could suggest is to make sure you have the latest intel chipset drivers for the 8200, if these are not installed it will have a negative effect on system performance especially disk access.
One other thing might be worth noting, you haven't mentioned what file system is in use. I recommend you use NTFS as it tends not to get as fragmented as FAT32.

woolymammoth

sounds to me like it could be a worm or virus of some sort...
i'd recommend you get spybot... it usually digs out all spyware & adware.
update norton and do a full virus scan too.
at this stage, anythings worth a try.

Inspector Gadget

Your disk fragmentation is down to the fact that you're using the machine quite heavily, and (it would seem) you're creating and deleting lots of small files - the ideal recipe for fragmentation.

Your old Win98 machine won't show fragmentation as readily as it uses a FAT file system rather than NTFS as XP Pro does by default - as NTFS's cluster sizes are generally much smaller than FAT(32) clusters - say 4kb instead of 32kb as an example - an NTFS disk is statisically much more likely to be able to split files across those smaller fragments than a FAT one (in the instance, say, of a 4MB MP3 file - using the above numbers for the sake of example, that's 1024 x 4kb NTFS clusters (e.g. up to 1024 potential fragments) where on the FAT32 disk that's only 128 x 32kb clusters, or 128 potential fragments.

(In case you're thinking this is a backward step, the reason cluster sizes are getting smaller is to allow file systems to be more economical with space - unless a file's size is an exact multiple of the disk's cluster size, there'll be unused space left in the last cluster occupied by the file - with the same example cluster sizes, a 66kB file will use 17 x 4kb clusters = 68kb on NTFS, which means that there's 2kb of "slack" in the last cluster, where on the 32kb/cluster FAT system it uses 3 x 32kb clusters = 96kb, which means there's 30kb of slack. Almost every file on your HDD has some amount of slack - this adds up to at least tens of megabytes for a reasonably sized disk)

To be honest, I don't think that it's fragmentation that's the biggest source of your problems - I think you've got a lot of software running in the background "taking your CPU's eye off the ball", so to speak. Also remember that as a general rule desktop HDDs will handsomely outperform laptop HDDs of the same generation - this is down to a number of factors, such as spindle speeds (decided more by power consumption more than anything else).

Check how many processes you've got running in the background to see what's going on. While you're at it, go to http://www.sysinternals.com/ and get FileMon - see for yourself what applications are accessing your HDD and which files they're accessing. See if you find anything suspicious.

(I'm not sure if it's relevant or not, but the single thing that slows the machine I'm writing this on more than any other process is McAfee anti-virus...)

HTH,
Gadget

ondablade

Thanks for the help guys, I've some things to try out. The only bit I'm not so sure about is why the problem is so specific to IE use, and also why it's getting owrse with time. Scuse my delay in coming back.