Defragment

[Pedah]

Just a simple question, there are many PPC apps that claim to be able to optimize CF and SD cards, as there are no moving parts and the cards seem to work fine speed wise is there any advantage to defrag storage cards, and from there can you do it to your ax. Just hypothesising!

[Drifter]

The easiest way is to occassionally reformat.

[Pedah]

Originally Posted by Drifter

The easiest way is to occassionally reformat.

So backup data from disk, format, restore data. What if I have programs installed to disk, will this mix up anything?
Obviously a hard reset of the axim means I have to reinstall but would thos be the equivalent for the axim?

[philpugh]

Good question - never tried it but...

I suspect that a full backup, re-format and restore of your card shouldn't affect any apps installed onto the card. The information for launching the apps will be kept locally to the PDA. (E.g. Registry information et al). I tend not to install to cards though. Unless you are doing a lot of writing / deleting / re-writing of files on the card I suspect there will be none to marginal improvement by de-fragmentation.

[Pedah]

Seriously I'm asking cause I install everything to CF and am trying to keep as much of ax free as possible, running some big reference books and it frees up memory for OS functions, just used to PC and habitually optimizing.

[philpugh]

Pedah,

I would expect most (if not all) applications to be OK if you back up their data. You could you try it with a 'spare' CF card and one app. Back it up, 'format' the card and restore the backup.

[Pedah]

Originally Posted by philpugh

Pedah,

I would expect most (if not all) applications to be OK if you back up their data. You could you try it with a 'spare' CF card and one app. Back it up, 'format' the card and restore the backup.

How logical, didn't even think of it. http://www.aximsite.com/articles/link.php?id=250
read an interesring article on formating flash memory. (hope the link works)

[Pedah]

I got a trial version of pocket mechanic it offers defragment, disk cleanup etc I am not sure if it truly does what it implies. It contradicts what we've been talking about.

[Mahstah]

In my experience, defrag is not necessary on memory cards. If you do defrag, try out Pocket Mechanic's storage card benchmark program and see if it makes a diff between before and after and post back with results. Should be interesting.

[Pedah]

Originally Posted by Mahstah

In my experience, defrag is not necessary on memory cards. If you do defrag, try out Pocket Mechanic's storage card benchmark program and see if it makes a diff between before and after and post back with results. Should be interesting.

I used the trial of pocket mechanic and lo and behold, especially with SD card that is my "storage" device, bench mark varied before to after defrag. What I noticed mainly was after diskcheck, diskcleanup, defrag I had a little more space on SD card. May be wishful thinking on my part, so I'm in the process of putting a whole heap of files mp3, .doc, .ppt, and download full email rather than headers and see if it still shows a change. I downloaded Ilium screencapture, awesome, I'll document the process and hopefully I'm not dreamin, but On auto with processor settings I get less hangups today
[thanks for the screen capture link] Igot pocket mechanic pro, and battery pack pro on the differences I saw today.[after my last hard reset I forgot battery pack lite and I reinstalled and got a plugin I didn'y have before and it's good] Thanks for the feedback. NOOB question, when I click insert image I am prompted for a URL for image source, I'm not sure of the address settings Ineed to type in, Li'l help.