Why Not Just be Happy?

[KnightWRX]

I have done a little research and this comes straight from the Microsoft website. Now I am really confused, can you tell me where you learned that Defragging was not required?

Every filesystem gets fragmented. Filesystems simply cannot guarantee that file allocation and growth is continuous on a hard drive. It's just impossible (unless you're ready to sacrifice a lot of performance doing "on the fly defragmentation" or a lot of space to pre-allocate a lot of extra blocks to accomodate the growing and changing of files.)

The performance of Windows' NTFS filesystem and other Unix filesystem under fragmentation loads is very similar and all much better than FAT based filesystems were. That's the point, the "slow down" isn't quite as there on NTFS, and it is about the same you would suffer from HFS+.

If you read the early Microsoft docs on NTFS, this was one of its selling point. Now that they bothered to produce a defrag tool, why wouldn't they promote it and its use ?

Again, I won't fight this holy war about file fragmentation on disks. It's a lost cause. People swear by defragmentation to keep a filesystem's performance up, I know that's grasping at straws and the benefits are negligible enough that I shouldn't bother with it.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

OK, How about my 2008 windows box which shipped with XP (i.e. current shipping OS) and my 2008 iMac running leopard.

The experience was still better on OSx. No virus scan, no defrag, no blue screen of death, no problems. Windows is just not the same no matter how you spin it. I have run dos/windows boxes since the 8088 was introduced. I have designed motherboards, and whole computers. I jumped to OSx in 2008. Best move I ever made. I do not regret my decision nor do I second guess it. My windows experience has always been lack luster. Although I had no idea how lack luster it was until I upgraded to a Mac.

Sure I can configure the snot out of it, but what good is that if it is always crashing and the hardware is always needing upgrades?

The OS is the base of all users experience. I agree it should be about the programs you run, and there are many good ones on both OS's. However a program crashing, should not bring down the entire system if the OS is stable, I can not say that with Windows. I reboot regularly with any and all versions I have run.

Actually, by 2008 Vista was out, so XP was outdated. And Vista had the same protected driver model as Windows 7, so blue screens shouldn't have happened, the computer should gracefully recover. Also, defrag was a background process, so you shouldn't have to worry about that either. Honestly, I haven't experienced the "Windows Experience" that you're talking about since the early days of XP, ie 2002, +/-

 

[Eidorian]

Because I want to be able to run Visual Studio. I need Windows 7 for that. I want to run video games at max settings at >1fps. The 6630m that I have isn't an option in the air. I want to type in the dark. The backlit keyboard wasn't an option on the air. I want to watch blu-ray's on my computer. That option will never be available on the air. I want to use Zune, I can't unless I boot up into Windows. I also didn't want to waste money, so instead of spending $2,548.00 to equip a MBP with the specs I wanted (which technically doesn't exist because I wanted USB 3.0 too, but I digress), I just got a Dell for 2/5th the price.

And I'm very happy with it.

And seriously, is it really that ugly?

The red one is better.

I was tempted to pick up the 15" sibling for ~$779 at launch with a 3 year warranty. My only complaint would be the quality of the LCD panel. How is it on the 3450?