My personal opinnion is that defragmenting is a typical thing that's blown out of proportion. Unless you have a really horrible system that thrashes the harddrive fragmentation will be no performance problem in daily life.
Slow I/O combined with virus checks is the main culprit and the defragmenting is just a noneffective band-aid in attempt to fix it.
These days, it's true that defragmentation has a significantly reduced impact over what it once did - multitasking systems tend to read disks in small "fragments" regardless of whether the contents of individual files are placed in sequence or not.
However, files that are still read sequentially by a single threaded linear processes can easily be affected by defragmentation, so people still often see marked improvement performing some tasks - even though other tasks are entirely unaffected.
But that's neither here nor there - regardless of your opinion of what you think the "problem" is, a system is what it is, and virus checkers are what they are - and your combination of hardware and software may be in a completely different class than a system that another player must still use, due to financial or other constraints. And as everyone who does computer systems knows, doing a few things - even if they each only help a little - can add up to a remarkable difference over not doing anything at all.
So regardless of how little defragmentation seems to help you, to tell others that doing so
WONT or CANT help them - and then blame their hardware or software of being insufficient if it does - is kind of silly in my honest opinion - and in many instances, you are likely to be entirely wrong.
Defragmentation costs nothing to perform except a bit of time (which can easily be when you aren't using the system).
You seem to be almost on a crusade to stamp out defragmentation, is there a reason for this?
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P.S. By the way - Larry certainly wouldn't be the first person to potentially detect a disk problem far earlier than he otherwise might have through defragmentation - there is something to be said for a process that reads through most if not all of the contents of the hard disk every once in a while, and reports any problems that it finds.
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