How to have Poker Tracker not bog your computer

[Nfinity]

[ QUOTE ]

Oh, and a question for you hard drive guys: Would putting PT on a USB hard drive do any good on a one drive system?

[/ QUOTE ]

Good question, like to know the answer myself.

[Mr. Graff]

[ QUOTE ]
Do yourself a big favor. Download PerfectDisk 7.0 and run it a couple times a week until the free trial runs out.

[/ QUOTE ]
What is the advantage os using this program over the normal "Disk Defragmenter" in Windows System Tools. I rarely Deframent my disk because it takes 10 hours or so. Will this program decrease this time?

[Terry]

Let me see if I can explain this without doing a long-winded tutorial on how Windows uses disk space and why disks get fragmented.

The first time you run PerfectDisk it will take a long time but unless you have a very large disk with a whole of stuff on it I don’t think it will be 10 hours ... can’t be sure, though. After the first time it will not take nearly so long, and after a few runs it will work very quickly ... minutes, not hours.

The program uses what it calls Smart Placement. That means it figures out which programs you use the most and which files tend to get changed and fragmented the most. Over the course of a few runs it puts the files that rarely change all toward the beginning of the disk so they won’t have to be defragmented on the next run and puts the files that change frequently (and therefore get fragmented) toward the end of the disk. The result is that not only is your disk defragmented, it is also less likely to become fragmented in the future, so defrags become very quick.

For most people, I think the first run will probably be less than an hour. You guys who have never defragged will take longer. It’s a good thing (I can say that now that she’s out of jail, right?) and it is a free trial. Your hard drive will thank you ... by running faster. Start it up before bedtime, watch it for a little while just to see what it does, sleep tight, and listen to that disk hum in the morning.

[spamuell]

Thanks for this Terry, I think I'll do it because my computer has been running very slowly recently. Do you know if there is any significant chance of losing important data when defraggmenitng my HD? I vaguely recall that you're meant to back up your HD first but I might be thinking of something else.

[astroglide]

xp has native defrag optimization. i don't think it's worth spending money on a defragger with xp, with 2k on down it was a bigger factor.

just schedule the standard defragger and use http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/fr...gedefrag.shtml

[Terry]

Well, lots of things tell you to do a back up first. Personally, the only thing I back up is my PT database. The last time I actually did a real system back up it was for my 20MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive that went on 14 of the new super high tech 3.5 inch floppies.

Putting aside my “back ups are for sissies” attitude, let’s say that a well maintained and defragmented disk is less likely to fail and cause you to lose data because it physically has to do less work, in that the heads have much less jumping around to do to find the files.

Defragging programs are generally pretty safe. They examine a file and if it needs defragmenting they write the new unfragmented version before they delete the old one, so even if the power goes out your data should be safe.

So sure, back up if you can or if it makes you feel more comfortable, but defragging is an important part of computer maintenance ... to important to skip.

By the way, this subject is not a hijacking of this thread. It is particularly applicable to speeding up PT. The big database is constantly changing and fragmenting. Getting it all together in one contiguous file rather than spread all over the disk in hundreds of separate pieces is, shall we say, a good thing.

[krimson]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]

Oh, and a question for you hard drive guys: Would putting PT on a USB hard drive do any good on a one drive system?

[/ QUOTE ]

Good question, like to know the answer myself.

[/ QUOTE ]

No, the data cannot travel over the USB connection very fast. This will slow down poker tracker considerably.

A faster harddrive (or a RAID array of harddrives) are the best choices for speeding things up. As well having enough RAM will stop your OS from trying to use the harddrive as memory.

[bdk3clash]

If anyone cares, the steps I took detailed in this post have improved my system's performance quite a bit.

[Terry]

That’s an interesting article, astroglide. I almost stopped reading when I got to “IMO, you should run Disk Defragmenter every few months” but I did read the whole thing, since you seem to know your stuff.

Defragging every few months may be ok for people who don’t do much – send emails, browse the web, maybe play an occasional non-demanding game, but that advice simply makes no sense for people who are using a large, constantly changing database. It is stated as the author’s opinion, not a fact, and it is an opinion with which I strongly disagree.

Yes, the defragger built into XP is kinda ok. It is Diskeeper Lite, actually. Diskeeper (the full version) is a very good defragger – shame Microsoft didn’t license the whole thing instead of just the lite version.

PageDefrag is fine too, for a tweaker like yourself, but I am really aiming at the guys here who don’t defrag at all. I’m trying to give them a quick, easy way to get their disks in shape without them having to learn a whole lot of technical stuff.

I know that you know what you’re talking about, and most of the other guys know it too ... but I’d bet a lot of them don’t really know what you’re talking about, if you get my drift. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Anyway, I know a bit about what I’m talking about too. I’ve used most every defragger that’s come along since the days of PCTools and the original Norton Speed Disk (pre-Symantec). This one is the best I’ve seen, even better than the full version of Diskeeper, which I used for a long time. It does make a difference ... and it is very easy to use, no technical knowledge whatsoever is required to gain the full benefit.

A couple years, yeah, I’d have said a top-end defragger wasn’t worth considering for an average user. Now that so many of us are running this big database (and are therefore no longer “average” users), I think it is worth considering. For me, it was worth buying ... but I’m a tweaker.