Norton 360 appears to be preventing defrages before 10% fragmentation. Need to know how to get around Norton. Have tried taking off the tamper protection for the duration of the windows defrage but that didn't change things. After two defrages with the tamper protection off I still have 8% fragmentation. What shall I do?
SendOfJive; Thanks for the efforts my friend. I turned off the Idle Time Optimizer as you indicated ( And applied it ) and attempted a defrage with the Tamper protection on ( And applied it ) for the first defrage and then off ( And applied that ) for the second defrage. Neither of these manuvers allowed for a successful defrage. I am still at 8% fragmentation. Got any other suggestions?
Defragging in Safe Mode generally allows for a more thorough job. You could try that. In addition, Norton does not run in Safe Mode, so Tamper Protection and Auto-Protect will be off.
. All the Optimizer does is schedule a defrag whenever it detects that a new program has been installed.
Where did you get that idea?
I runs defrag /a /c; if Windows doesn't recommend defragmenting (it won't unless its 10% fragmented, excluding 64MB chunks), N360 won't defrag; it doesn't have a defragmenter of its own.
To answer the OP: just let the preinstalled defrag in Task Scheduler run (defrag -c) which will ignore the 10% rule.
Let me add some info here. Too much defragmention can turn your PC to open defragmented files very slowly. Because the Operating system is storing the files on the Hard Drive according to its convenience, So that it can pull up those files easily when the user asks for it. By default N360 will do a lite defrag only (which uses the Windows Defrag configurations) as over-defragmentation might posses effect on the PC performance and the Hard Drive usage. It's safe to do a defragmentation below 10%.
Norton 360 appears to be preventing defrages before 10% fragmentation. Need to know how to get around Norton. Have tried taking off the tamper protection for the duration of the windows defrage but that didn't change things. After two defrages with the tamper protection off I still have 8% fragmentation. What shall I do?
. All the Optimizer does is schedule a defrag whenever it detects that a new program has been installed.
Where did you get that idea?
Symantec.
"Norton AntiVirus automatically schedules the optimization when it detects the installation of an application on your computer. The optimization process starts next time when your computer is idle."
Subash: I can't say I agree. If a file is fragmented across distant cylinders, defragmenting it--no matter its location--will eliminate mid-file seek times. Additionally, packing all files at the beginning of the disk slows overall disk access as all new/changed files are now the furthest possible distance away from the MFT and at the slowest possible (used) portion of the disk and will create "holes"/free space in the packed data anyway.
Optimally, you want the MFT ~30% into the used portion of the disk and free space at the beginning of the disk for new/changed files as this is the fastest part of the disk.
According to a long time drive supoport contact of mine who used to design hard drives at various well known companies, most of this is no longer valid because of the effect that massive solid state caches on hard drives has, because of changes in the physical layout of drive disks and because of changes in the file systems structure ......
Not that I understand much of it but I trust him .......