On Thu, 24 Mar 2016 21:26:56 +0000, Chris French wrote:

Johnny B Good Wrote in message:
On Thu, 24 Mar 2016 15:25:23 +0000, Chris J Dixon wrote:
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The cycnic in me informs me that this is just a 'failsafe' way of
building in 'planned obsolescence' It's the home computer equivalent of
Microsoft's Cockamaimee Pagefile default settings in windows designed
to accelerate "System Senility" by aggravating the effects of file
system fragmentation due to normal file writing activities further
aggravated by the endless file churn from the never ending stream of
windows updates and fixes.

Microsoft's partnership deals with the PC hardware manufacturers,
effectively a cartel and informally known as "Wintel" on account of the
major chip supplier being Intel, benefited both parties in boosting
sales. Obviously, wintel would like to sell as much product as possible
and this pagefile trick was Microsoft's 'failsafe' contribution to
shortening the upgrade cycle to drive such an increase in sales.
on such a sneaky trick).

snip JBG paranoia

As it happened, MSFT's trick was never embarrassingly exposed in the
mass media so they were able to continue this ruse for over two
decades. Part of the reason for this success was that they offered the
end users pagefile settings options to completely eliminate this
particular effect,
neatly silencing any outcries from technically competent users who
would more likely feel they'd "gotten one over" on "The Dumb Consumers"
reinforcing their (justifiable) sense of smugness.
.


Funny they should introduce automatic defragmentation in Windows 7
then ( if not before, can't remember now) which would rather seem to
defeat this cunning plan. It seems to work well enough as if I ever
check (rarely) one of my machines it seems to be only slightly
fragmented.

Afaicr, "auto-defrag" was introduced with the ironically named Vista. It
may be no coincidence that MSFT removed the graphical display of progress
(indeed, no progress indicator at all) at this time since this offered
too much by way of a clue as to the distribution of the hundreds of
pagefile fragments that could land up spread right across the whole disk
volume when using the default pagefile settings. A bare percentage figure
of fragmentation tells only a small part of the story.

Back in the days of NT5.x when the defragmentation tool displayed such a
graphical representation of the fragmentation state (in a 'before' and
'after' graphic), it was easy to spot where the unmovable system files'
fragments (marked in green) were located. Indeed, I used the analyse
function to verify that the 4095MB pagefile in my win2k system was
occupying the very first half of the 8GB FAT32 partition space (as per my
intention) which was occupying the fastest outermost cylinders of the
second (1TB) HDD specifically to reduce head contention issues.

I well remember dealing with a winXP system, just a few short years
back, which seemed to be performing particularly slowly indeed. After
running the initial scans for malware, I ran defrag on the single huge
disk volume so classic of a winXP vintage OEM install which, when
completed, revealed in its 'after defragmentaion' display, the most
grassiest of displays I'd ever seen of the 'free space' area right across
the whole disk volume. From the report details, it was quite obvious that
virtually all 'the blades of grass' were owned by the pagefile's
thousands of fragments. Once I'd remedied the situation, the system
became noticeably perkier.

I have to admit that what made this particular job so memorable was the
*unusual* severity of the "Fragmentation Hell" effect of a pagefile still
using the default configuration settings (presumably for "Like forever
'n' ****").

Quite frankly, this "Auto-Defrag" feature of NT6.x was little better
than a "Band aid Solution" that could be much better addressed by
intelligent partitioning and de-cockamaimee-fying of the pagefile
settings.

Indeed, such a strategy "To keep on top" of the ongoing fragmentation
issue (aggravated not only by the default pagefile behaviour but also by
the endless file churn generated by windows updates) seemed to me to be
more a pointless game of "Whack-a-Mole" designed to work the poor HDD
into an early grave with a less than desirable constant HDD busy lamp
activity reducing its usefulness as an indicator of possible malware/
spyware activities.

It's even possible that this "neat feature", seemingly aimed at
consumers who had discovered the need to run the defrag utility on a
regular schedule to maintain their computer's performance was added more
as a sneaky way to disguise covert system activity than as a simple sop
to the consumer's desire for MSFT to "Do Something About File System
Fragmentation". However, maybe that's just my deep mistrust (gained over
the past two decades) of MSFT's motives, colouring my cynical view (aka
"paranoia" as you expressed it). :-)

BTW, apropos of nothing, your news client seems to be worth slightly
less than you paid for it since it appears unable to handle properly
formed sig lines, as per the quotage below. Just possibly there's a
setting in regard of sig line handling you might be able to customise.


--
Johnny B Good



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Johnny B Good