Defrag, scan disk, and deleting cookies don't do much
In the computer world, there are hot rodders - people who will tweak their computers to get every last bit of horse power out of their systems.
Just as with automobiles, techniques used by hot rodders were once necessary in the early days when horse power was hard to come by.
Today, most computers come with all the horsepower most people need. Important tasks like defragmenting the hard drive, running scan disk and deleting cookies no longer do anything spectacular to the performance of the average computer.
Cookies are harmless - even the shady ones. Defragging does little on a 250 gig hard drive and scandisk is take care of by utility features in Windows that run every time you boot up or shut down.
If you have had your computer for six years and it has been used extensively for editing photos, listening to music and playing games, you may need to clean up that 10 percent fragmentation on your hard drive so that you can increase the performance by 3 percent.
If that sounds like too much work for too little performance increase, behold, my point.
Anyone who tries to tell you that such procedures are necessary and helpful either is trying to sell a utility program or is offering advice based on information they gathered in 1999.
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defrag
FYI, until recently my 250 GB drive stuffed with photos from my dslr easily used to reach more than 10% fragmentation within a matter of days. Run batch jobs on large sets using photoshop or a raw converter, and you'll quickly see red all over the drive. It's quite irritating working with a badly fragmented drive full of relatively small files (3MB-20MB).
As for "too much work for too little performance increase", I haven't had to defrag manually or schedule defrags for the 4 drives in my 1.5TB setup for the past few months. I simply installed an automatic defragmenter and that was it; it's been running smoothly ever since. It handles all the defrag related stuff on it's own without requiring any input from me.
BTW chkdsk is useful for checking file system errors; it need not be run regularly because it provides no performance benefit.
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