Do I need to worry about viruses and defragmentation?

[Michael Haney]

On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Brian McKee <brian.mckee at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 1:40 PM, markfpyles <markfpyles at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi everyone:
>>
>> I was just wondering since I am just coming off of a windows machine whether
>> or not I need to have some type of anti-virus software installed and also if
>> I need to worry about defragmentation. Thanks.
>
> No and no :-)
>
> (the fine print)
> You can of course accidentally forward a virus without knowing it and
> it will infect the person you sent it to still...
>
> And, if you run a very full harddrive (say over 95% full) for a length
> of time you can actually start to have some fragmentation because the
> system just doesn't have enough room to keep things tidy.
> (end the fine print)
>

Correct, the way EXT3 works prevents file fragmentation or at least
minimizes it to some degree unlike NTFS which has a high degree of
developing file fragmentation.  I usually have to defrag my Vista
laptop at least once a week or it starts to really slow down.  Darn
you Micro$oft and your crappy OS!

Probably the most shocking thing to me is that files on an NTFS
partition which I haven't used in a long time and were defragmented
suddenly show up as fragmented when I run O&O Defragmenter
Professional in XP.  How the in the holy heck can a file that's hardly
ever accessed and never written to end up being fragmented?


-- 
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
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