remember waiting hours for this to finish

I remember the one under ms dos 6.0. Defrag, 20 minutes for 80 mb hard disk

Watching this as a kid was mildly addicting.

Defrag Simulator.

Norton Disk Doctor, PC Tools Disk Optimizer, MS Defrag

I actually loved watching it.

All too well. Loved the noises it made too, you could tell it was working hard to make me 3% faster at loading my MS paint 🚮

Remember watching it halt at 95% complete and then freezing so the volume was corrupted and I got to install EVERYTHING again and load any data from floppy disk backup which as sometimes a whole problem in itself..

I still do this regularly 😳 did people stop doing defragmentation? 🧐

This process was filled with anxiety for me, what if something goes wrong? :O golden times!

I used to like watching it work. 😆

...and then realizing you forgot to delete a bunch of things and have to do it again...

You felt productive just running this. “It’s so much faster now. Level up!”

かつての日本の有名掲示板「2ch」ではデフラグさんというキャラクターが生み出されました。

I worked on the precursor to this as a developer. For those that don't get what a defragger does, here it the short version... When the system writes a file to the disk it just fills up whatever space is empty. That empty space may not be in one big chunk, but split up all over the place. When you go to read that file back it has to move the "read" head back and forth to find it and read it. Back then seek times cost a lot of time. If your files were small, defragging did not make much difference. If the files were larger, then defragging would put all the blocks together so when you went to read it, it would just be one head seek and one big read. The upside of consolidating the files and the free space was that when you went to write something big, there was a big space to write it, and it did not have to be cut up. I could get into the internals and the intricacies of other aspects of it, but I said it was going to be short. So much for that. 😉

I couldn't look away. 90's fidget spinner.

best relaxing activity.

All i remember is it break every time and never finished

Usually did this during sleep, and woke up to find out that somehow it restarted.

@grok explain this for the GEN Z peeps that will never have to experience our pain please

@RadioRaps I made the mistake of defragging a 20Gig hard drive on a 650MHz Celeron system. Took the whole night.

This is how I clean my house

Yes I do. The hard drive sounded like someone shaking a bucket of bolts.

Especially if your hard drive is writing files would take forever to defrag

yes, i do

To this day I still don't know what it did or how it even optimized by computer.

First ASMR ever

Remember? I'm doing it right now

It was so satisfying.

And the computer was not really faster after that 😭😂

Still a amazing programme Defrag ✅️

And waking up to this

Yes, that's why I moving on to Linux

懐かしい…。

I remember them all turning red once too. I'll never forget that HDD failure.