winscape 2344

De-fragging is the equivalent to dusting as a housekeeping chore. What it does is rearrange the "furniture" such that a sequential read of a file can be done optimally. How often and the methods used depend on the operating system and its usage.

This has nothing to do with fragmentation of file storage. This is something that any decent operating system can handle. TOPS-10 put these iffy physical disk blocks into a file located on SYS: and was called BADBLK.SYS. Note: the filename meant exactly what it said. Occasionally, one of my files would occupy a spot on the disk that degenerated. I would get an error from the OS whenever I accessed it. So I would RENAME BADFIL.FOO=file.ext and leave it. Then, when TW did the DSKRATs, the program would find my bad files and put the bad block into the BADBLK.SYS file. This way no other user, no other read, no other write would ever see that bad block again.

Note that, unless one of these bad blocks was used by a few crucial files on the system, performance was never affected from the point of view of the user.

Like I said, DOS is an example of what not to do. I'm beginning to think that each and every instruction of that OS is going to be an example.

BAH