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#10
noobvious,
1) The extent and actual incidence of fragmentation on home computers can vary substantially since it depends on usage patterns, disk capacity etc. So there is no general answer to your question.
2) In XP, splitting of a file into 2 or more pieces was considered fragmentation. But in Vista, MS changed the algo so that pieces larger than 64 mb were ignored in the defrag process. This was because more emphasis was now placed on the performance impact of defragmentation. If the chunks were large enough, they wouldnt elongate seek times significantly. Moreover ignoring such large chunks would reduce pressure on the system and also do away with the need to find temporary storage areas for large chunks.
Point is XP and Vista would report different percentages of defragmentation.
3) I believe in Win7, the defrag process has been made more comprehensive in that, win7 can reallocate some files that vista couldnt.
But best to schedule defrag to run automatically and periodically in the background.
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