You're communicating just fine, Chrismine.

Personally, I favour defragging every now and then. About once a month I do a disk cleanup and defrag. I ran a hard drive (hard ) without defragging for about 6 months once, and I reckon the defrag (when I got round to doing it) did help with access times - probably more noticeable on older drives given the access times of the really up-to-date stuff nowadays.

Also, an XP or later defrag isn't going to move every file on the drive like Windows 98 and earlier versions used to. So it isn't nearly as intense on the hard drive.

The way some AVs thrash the drive on a daily basis is a different story, I reckon. Now that is working a hard drive hard! Surely once or twice a week is enough given all the scanning these programs run on any file load and execute anyway?