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From: Paul <nospam@needed.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Subject: Re: Microsoft to force new Outlook on Windows 10 PCs
Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2025 02:52:40 -0500
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On Wed, 1/15/2025 1:56 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Jan 2025 03:09:43 +0000, Manu Raju wrote:
> 
>> Linux gets bloats every two weeks
>> and some people like it!  I don't and so I solved the dilemma by moving
>> to Windows.
> 
> Windows is the one that needs regular defragging and running of dodgy 
> hacks like CCleaner etc. Linux does not.
> 

On an SSD, TRIM is preferred to defrag.

The Windows defragmenter is a pretty clever design now. The
one in WinXP era was written by a third party company, and it
was of the "solid green bar" kind, with all the files pushed
shoulder to shoulder. The one written in-house by Microsoft staff,
doesn't do that. Space is left between files. I haven't seen a
description of how that helps, but normally fragmentation is
not an issue. And I haven't seen reports of fragmentation-related
issues. The defragmenter does "consolidate", there is *some*
pushing together, but it's not the solid green line kind of
effort. This is why the defrag takes ten minutes instead of
eight hours.

Defragmentation of hard drives in Windows is still a thing,
and the Optimizer has this scheduled for once a week or so.
At which time, the fragmentation might be 2%-3% or so. Unless
you have used pathological tools to fragment the file systems
on purpose, they're not usually chopped all that much in a
time frame like that. You could, for example, use the Passmark
Fragmenter, to implement a pathological case.

The way Windows buffers data on writes has changed. And this
could be seen in the Passmark Fragmenter. In an OS like
windows 7, you could see fragments 4096 bytes in size (one cluster).
While the OS writes in cluster quanta, the write buffer was
changed to 64KB, and it won't write one cluster when one cluster
is ready. It waits until there is a larger amount. This caused
the writer on the Fragmenter to make no fragment smaller than
64KB. And you could no longer achieve the same level of "Swiss Cheese"
in the file system, as before. This could partially be due to the
prevalence of SSDs and the need to write in block-sized chunks,
or it could be related to the COW problem. But quietly, a change
was made to writing, and I haven't seen a popular article with
the details.

I don't use CCleaner here. What was the problem again ?
There are people who use Registry Cleaners. Is that clever ?
Not really. The registry files stay relatively small. They're
journaled for integrity, the file system has a journal as well,
making the Registry files quite good at avoiding trouble.
Corruption of the Registry might be more common in the
Win98 era when the power goes off.

   Paul