Defrag while on battery?

depending on the processor useage and the fragmentation of the hard disk, it may take a while so I would completely discourage the use totally of any system maintainance while running on battery power.

Frankly, I'd question why you want to defrag your HD in the first place. It does little to improve the performance of ones PC...  in fact there's an article to this affect in the April edition of PC Pro.

modular - your comment flies in the face of logic.  If one never defragments their HD and it becomes signficantly fragmented then the performance can certainly suffer as a result.  Let's say you have a 1 MB file, that over time is fragemented into 100 pieces scattered all around the hard drive.  Trying to read the file now requires 100 seek operations of the read/write head compared to one seek operation if the file had been contiguous.  This would make accessing the file in question MUCH slower than had the the clusters assoicaited with the file been contiguous (i.e. not fragmented).

 

Even PC Pro magazine says the following:

"Windows XP's NTFS filing system is far more efficient and faster than the old FAT16 and FAT32 systems, but despite initial claims to the contrary NTFS volumes can become fragmented over time. With single logical files being split into different physical areas of the hard disk, performance is reduced quite a bit."

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/50758/speed-tweaks/page2.html

Tony