Reduce fragmentation for inexperienced users

Inexperienced users don't do disk clean-up, scandisk, and defrag and will inevitably come back to you complaining that their PC has slowed WAY down. Save yourself some trouble. When you set up their computer, create a 2nd partition / drive large enough to hold their virtual memory (I use 3 - 3.5x the physical memory and set it as a fixed setting) and a couple of gigs of temporary files. Then create TEMP and TMP directories on the 2nd disk and set the TEMP and TMP variables to those directories.

Sure, there is a slight performance hit on going to the second disk for virtual memory, but all the commonly fragmented files will be off the disk where all their data is and disk access for their files will be fast. And, when you do run defrag / clean disk, it runs fast. A little performance hit every time beats major slow-downs later.

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This was first published in May 2006

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