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X P/V I S T A
defragmenting SSD drives is
useless
Regardless of the actual value of defragmenting a physical hard disk
(see the tip on the right), there’s really no value at all in defragging an
SSD. The reason has to do with the way fl ash memory is constructed. The
theory behind defragmenting a hard drive is to order data into contiguous, uninterrupted
segments of the disk. But fl ash memory isn’t built that way: Blocks of data are placed
throughout the drive space and are all accessible with the exact same speed, and since
there are no moving parts in an SSD, there’s no advantage to rearranging them. Some
even caution that, since fl ash memory is limited to a fi nite number of writes before it fails,
defragmenting can actually do more harm than good.
D O N’T D O ITX P/V I S T A
defragmenting
your hard drive
improves
performance
One of the most venerable
suggestions for improv-
ing disk performance is to
defragment your hard drive regularly.
The science of defragging is sound: By
putting all the bits of a fi le or applica-
tion in sequential order on your drive,
the drive should have to do less work
(and spend less time) to access those
fi les. Thus: faster performance. Well, in
practice it’s not really true. Today’s hard
drives are fast enough to make fragmen-
tation largely irrelevant, and our bench-
mark tests have repeatedly borne this
out: On moderately fragmented drives,
defragmentation will offer negligible to
no performance increase. For seriously
fragmented drives (think 40 percent
or more), especially those running XP
or older OSes, defragmentation can
help, but don’t expect the world. As for
third-party defrag tools, there’s no real
evidence that they’re any more effective
than Windows’ built-in defragger.
D O IT Click Disk Defragmenter under
Accessories / System Tools.X P/V I S T A
turning off the Windows splash
screen will shave time off your boot
No one seriously needs to be reminded they’re running Windows while the com-
puter is loading the OS, right? Turning off the Windows splash screen ought to
cut a little bit off of system boot time. For most systems, this generally works,
but we never saw an average improvement of more than two seconds—and even less on Vista
systems (probably because in lieu of the animated progress bar, you get a colorful Aurora).
Still, a second is a second....
D O IT XP: At the Run prompt, type msconfig. Click the BOOT.INI tab, and select the
/NOGUIBOOT option. Very similar for Vista: Run msconfi g, click the Boot tab, and select the No GUI
Boot option.windows tips
X PX PX P//V I S T A
eliminate the Recent
Documents/Recent Items folder Documents/Recent Items folder
with a registry hack
For privacy reasons, many users on shared computers like to clear the
Recent Documents folder or delete it altogether. Totally understandable,
but there’s no need to turn to the registry to do the job. It’s all in the invalu-
able TweakUI (and in Vista, it’s built into the OS).
D O IT In XP: Install TweakUI and browse to the Explorer section; then uncheck “Allow
Recent Documents on Start menu.” In Vista, right-click the taskbar, click the Start Menu
tab, and uncheck “Store and display a list of recently opened fi les.”