Thanks for the reminder.... doing so right after this short post/advert.

Dafydd

Ok, I did a brief video tutorial on how to use Defraggler to defrag your video files since some users won't know what to do. This software can defragment certain files, so it is much faster to use this than to defrag your entire drive. Plus, its free and stable and works on XP and Vista.

http://seemyworldonvideo.com/view/480/defragmenting-helps-powerdirector/ Win8 64-bit Pro Retail
Intel i7-4770
16GB DDR3 1600 8-8-8-24
MSI Z87-G45 Motherboard
ASUS GTX 660 Direct CU II OC 2GB GPU
1 TB RAID 1 (mirrored) Drive Array
Several scratch drives for video, TMP, pagefile.

Hi OnTheWeb
Nice one, good tip and tutorial.

Thanks.

Cheers
Adrian



Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.

Addendum
1) Run Disk cleanup
2) Use a freeware "ccleaner". This cleans the junk, corrects registry
3) Run De-frag
You will notice a marked difference PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

Hello, Defragging is a pretty good remedy for sluggish performance of PD.
I do it after every use of PD. I keep all my video files off of my C drive and it needs a good defrag after using PD. I'm impressed by how much better PD does perform after defragging. I have found a good defragger to use at: http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/ . The best thing about PD is the people in the Forums !!!
Win-7 Ultimate, ASUS Rampage III Extreme, Intel Core i7-980X, 12-GBs DDR3, Intel X25-M 160GB SDD, Asus nVidia GeForce GTX580 (1), Dell U3011 Monitor, Canon HF100 and HF-S21

It is better to schedule defrag tasks, isn't it ? PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

I don't like to schedule any programs to run on a schedule. One never knows what one might be doing when a scheduled program starts to run.
Defrag hogs lots of cpu time which will slow down other programs. I suggest to check to see if you need to defrag 3-5 times a week. Then run it when you're not going to use your machine or your not doing anything intense. The best thing about PD is the people in the Forums !!!
Win-7 Ultimate, ASUS Rampage III Extreme, Intel Core i7-980X, 12-GBs DDR3, Intel X25-M 160GB SDD, Asus nVidia GeForce GTX580 (1), Dell U3011 Monitor, Canon HF100 and HF-S21

To improve performance overall there are a few other I do, in addition to the very important process of defragging.

1. Ensure your not starting up and running loads of stuff you don't need (which is often more than 40% of the stuff your system starting). many programs load themselves up to varying degrees without your "knowledge". Each small bit takes resource and processor quanta, all this slows the system down.

2. certain Indexing functions on NTFS (XP/Vista etc..) disks, turn them off and disk access will be much improved. Secure data functions are especially resource hungry as are disk quotas.

3. Definitely ensure that you have at least 2 disk drives (not partitions) in your system. The system paging file should be on a different drive to Windows.

4. Read from one drive and preferably write to another.

5. I don't run defender, file indexing or other useful utilities that supposedly run in background when your processor is idle, many of these are actually quite poor at detecting when the processor is idle, or even when it's running an application but "waiting" momentarily! Defender I simply don't like overall.

6. Ensure your system is clean inside and airflow is not obstructed, many systems will slow down if they detect and over-temperature condition they cant rectify....and they won't necessarily tell you.

7. Don't have a massive paging file for windows to "manage" 2-3 gigabytes should be sufficient...if in performance monitor you see a lot of Hard page faulting, look to buy some extra RAM (in 32 bit systems more than 3 and a bit gig is not really addressed properly), so not worth going above 3-4 gb memory. Oh and only have ONE paging file, windows likes to set up one for each drive....which is a bit silly and they all need "managing".

8. Disk drives that are almost completely full are not usually going to be quick to write to. unfortunately many utilities don't measure this properly, so you won't necessarily know.

lastly if you can afford it get a decent GFX card for 100 upwards e.g. Nvidea CUDA enabled. It will help a lot even on the weaker systems.

Free programs to help in all this.

Advanced Windows Care
Winpatrol (the scotty dog one)
MZ Vista Force (really really good stuff for tweaking Windows) Intel Quad Core, NV 8800GT, Vista (32bit), Canon Powershot TX1. Editing 1280x720 (p) NTSC 30 fps motion jpeg in .avi container....to AVCHD DVDs for Blu Ray playback