4 ms·
Defrag98: Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter Simulator Online
- pir8life4me 1mo agoBrilliant. Whirring disk noise is nice touch. If AI generated this is what the AI revolution is all about. Can we get a cross platform screensaver?
- pyaamb 1mo agoNeed this but for AI models. Sleep mode where they self prune and optimize overnight for their daily purpose.
- CharlesW 1mo agohttps://platform.claude.com/docs/en/managed-agents/dreams https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/managed-agents/dreams
- vessenes 1mo agoI love this. I wanted the disk noise, and I got it. I will say that’s a lot faster than my drives were in the late 1990s though.
- haykuro 1mo agoThe speed is determined by a simple 1000 / <iops> per disk (there's different disks if you click "Settings"). If you inspect and go to sources and look for "1e3 /" you'll find the line responsible, you can set a breakpoint and change e.disk.iops to 1000 which will make the timeout per row 1s instead of 2-4s, so the whole thing goes faster.
- roger_ 1mo agoMy computer's definitely gonna be faster after this.
- NBJack 1mo agoI do laugh in that in all the times I ever did this for real (even back to my massive 170MB drive), it never felt much faster.
- jasonfarnon 1mo agoYou probably defragged frequently enough. You would definitely notice it if a file system got fragmented enough.
- chasil 1mo agoAt that point, you had to deal with questions of interleave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaving_(disk_storage) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaving_(disk_storage)
- wild_pointer 1mo agoLegend
- toast0 1mo agoLove the warning for using on a mobile device.
- MarvinYork 1mo agoThe sound killed me... :D
- singiamtel 1mo agoThere's something satisfying about defragging that has been lost to time. Like oiling a squeaky engine
- slig 1mo agoDegaussing too.
- koalalimpo 1mo agoBeuunnnnng
- gaudystead 1mo agoI was going to comment this same thing until I saw yours. I miss degaussing... Especially after holding a magnet to the CRT to get it to display fun colors it wasn't meant to and crossing your fingers that the degauss would fix the damage you'd wrought.
- rbanffy 1mo agoI once worked with a gigantic Apple (Sony, really) monitor on my desk. Every time I turned it on, it degaussed the monitors nearby. So many of us spent so much time staring at the barrel of a particle accelerator.
- 101008 1mo agoI agree. It may sound elitist but back then you need to understand a few concepts to use a computer. From simple things like a filesystem (folders, file, different file types, things my 19 years old nephew don't know), to how to install software, how to download software (!) and then things even a bit more technical: an operative system, how it works, booting, drivers, etc. Now everything is just easier (which is better for most people!) but I miss the old days.
- jlarocco 1mo agoI've said the same thing about using Linux. 20 years ago if somebody told you they used Linux it really meant something - they weren't running WSL, they weren't running a VM in EC2, they probably didn't power on and immediately have things working, and they probably learned a ton just getting to a login screen for the first time. Spinning up a VM just doesn't give the same learning experience.
- olivierestsage 1mo agoHot
- Hobadee 1mo agoI love it. A couple notes: - This is about 10x a real defrag speed - WAAAY too fast - IIRC the "Data that will not be moved" was typically lumped at the beginning of the drive, not spread out all over.
- msephton 1mo agoIt could be spread out too
- vunderba 1mo agoI'm a stickler for accuracy too. The defragged blocks in the original Win9x program weren't solid blue - they had a hatch pattern texture to them. I remember it way too vividly. Source: Watching a disk defrag was every millenial kids equivalent of going to the laundromat and watching laundry tumble. https://youtu.be/dc_SDyLYq3U?t=347 https://youtu.be/dc_SDyLYq3U?t=347
- someothherguyy 1mo agoauthor commenting on such things: https://morello.dev/blog/defrag98-rebuild https://morello.dev/blog/defrag98-rebuild what it looked like before https://morello.dev/blog/windows-98-defrag-simulator https://morello.dev/blog/windows-98-defrag-simulator a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40962195 here is another version i found when googling these things that seems somewhat similar, but with a few more "accurate" features. also, has the source available in a single file. https://horatioconkerhead.github.io/win98-defrag/ https://horatioconkerhead.github.io/win98-defrag/ if you want the real deal, you can run windows 95 in the browser quick. it took running it a few times to get it to actually defrag: https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
- bluejay2387 1mo agoI am guessing the developer took into account the fact that the younger generations these days don't have the patience for real time defragging.
- pjot 1mo agoWill need to degauss after this
- stavros 1mo agoWhat, you don't need the data any more? Or are you conflating screen degaussing?
- birdsongs 1mo agoWe used to degauss the CRTs because it looked cool and there was nothing else to do. Very adjacent to watching the defrag window maximised. I did it in computer lab and showed others and the teacher lost it, thought we were breaking things.
- pjot 1mo agoIt also made a really satisfying “boyoyoyinnng” sound
- brcmthrowaway 1mo agoWhat were the major filesystem technology improvements that made this redundant?
- predictsoft 1mo agoI think NTFS and SSD disks.
- WalterGR 1mo agoFragmentation is an issue with any file system. SSDs dramatically reduce the cost of fragmentation but do not eliminate it, as non-sequential access is still slower than sequential access.
- megagpt1 1mo agoFAT32 allocates the first free block. IIRC, file order must match disk order because reasons. Ext2 prioritized allocating the middle of free space to allow fragment-free growth on both sides and it became a standard filesystem feature after that.
- SoftTalker 1mo agoAnd, disk capacities got a lot larger. When most of the space on a disk is free, it's easier to allocate without fragmenting.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- antisol 1mo agoPretty sure it was really just smarter filesystems that avoid and/or reduce fragmentation automatically: just be a bit more clever about where you place things, and reorganise/optimise things automatically and silently in the background. Such things did exist back in the day, but they were relatively expensive to run since they had to run all the time. There was one that I used to run back in the 90s when windows was a thing. I think maybe it was diskeeper but I'm not sure.
- stavros 1mo agoI need to set up a Windows 95 computer with a hard drive and stream the defragging online, complete with live audio.
- josefrichter 1mo agobill gates, I want my time back!
- vunderba 1mo agoWhen I was younger, my friends and I joked about making a "Disk Fragmenter" which would enumerate through every file on the disk and split them into non-contiguous clusters to make sure that the actuator arm on your platter-drive gets a PROPER WORKOUT TO FEEL THE BURN.
- leoooodias 1mo agoLOL
- andikleen2 1mo agoSuch tools really exist and they're used for testing file systems, so that you have a more realistic "aged" layout on a freshly created test file systems. We also have memory fragmenters to do the same for memory for the same reasons.
- rbanffy 1mo agoOn CoW systems, file and block deduplication and writes to the middle of a file will do that for you.
- alwa 1mo agoWould those tools be primarily proprietary, or do some live in the open-source world too? I’d be interested in the techniques they use to aim for realism there. Admittedly I haven’t made much of a search, but various search engines and autocorrects seem really convinced that I mean “defragmenter” instead of “fragmenter,” despite myself…
- andikleen2 1mo agoIt's usually custom scripts, I'm not aware of a standard tool. You fill up the file system and then do lots of operations that cause fragmentation. Actually here is a recent paper discussing this (although the basic concept is much older): https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08858 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08858
- edoceo 1mo ago
- RetroTechie 1mo ago4 Drives, 5.5G total. Luxury! Per-drive individual sounds, and BSoD included. Nice touches, love it!
- 3eb7988a1663 1mo agoThere is even a click noise when you idly tap the screen. As great as it is, way too fast.
- mococa 1mo agoMy YouTube
- stuaxo 1mo agoIt feels a little too defragmented to start. Typically it would be getting some bits from other parts of the drive and there would be a few (that many) bits it wouldn't move because they were the swap file and DOS boot system files.
- cosmic_cheese 1mo agoI recall there being some techno-mysticism surrounding defragging regarding how often and when it was necessary, what it did and didn’t help, etc. I also remember the claim “Macs don’t need defragging” but I don’t know if HFS(+) was actually any less prone to fragmentation than FAT32 was. Companies like Symantec were happy to sell defragging tools to Mac users regardless.
- suprjami 1mo agoPeople used to say the same about Linux ext4, it didn't need defragmenting. afaics all that meant was file allocations make a little extra space at the end, so if the file expands it doesn't need to allocate a new block. If one keeps files around for a long time and constantly adds to them, then the files get fragmented on any filesystem. The only way to avoid this is pre-allocate all files to their maximum possible size and never exceed that size.
- toast0 1mo agoWikipedia claims [1]: > The HFS Plus file system transparently defragments files that are less than 20 MiB in size and are broken into 8 or more fragments when the file is being opened. Which I expect would have significantly reduced the need to defrag and thus reduced the joy of computing. :p [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_fragmentation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_fragmentation
- retired 1mo agoThis scratched an itch for me. I’m going to watch Johnny Castaway now.
- chasil 1mo agoDefragmenting XFS is much less dramatic.
- michaelmure 1mo agoIn the same vein, but showing live the go allocator and GC operating on the heap of a running program: https://github.com/MichaelMure/gogc98 https://github.com/MichaelMure/gogc98
- stoatstudios 1mo agoPerhaps it's appropriate for me to link to the free game I made where you play a taxi driving through Disk Defragmenter and delivering stray blocks of data to their final locations: https://safetystoatstudios.itch.io/ddr https://safetystoatstudios.itch.io/ddr. It was pretty fun to watch Defragmenter as a kid, but it would have been better if it was interactive, kind of like the 3D maze screensaver.
- suprjami 1mo agoAND you made it for Sega Genesis! That's so good.
- stoatstudios 1mo agoThanks :)
- pir8life4me 1mo agoBrilliant. Now we need a crazy taxi and GTA version where you cause mayhem trying to steal or return blocks.
- comradesmith 1mo agoI started the defrag on F and got about 1/4 the way, but had to stop cause my brother wanted to use the family computer. When I changed it between drives and back I lost my progress :/
- asmodeuslucifer 1mo agoI used to watch defrag (and defraggler). If you have OCD they are very satisfying to watch. The more fragmented they were to start with, the better.
- kstrauser 1mo agoI love this. However, Amiga’s Reorg program had a vastly better display, with a larger, resizable window and individual pixels instead of large boxes. You could see much more of the disk at once and get a feel for what the entire operation was doing. Large holes would appear in the middle of a hunk of data, then large files would get moved into the hole, leaving new holes where their incontiguous blocks use to be. Defrag was nice. Reorg was captivating. I miss it.
- alberth 1mo agoMaybe my memory is bad, but I recall defrag taking hours to complete.
- rbanffy 1mo agoI wish ext4, BtrFS, and XFS had something like this.
- lord_dut 1mo agoXFS does, though not visual. https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/xfs_fsr.8.html https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/xfs_fsr.8.html
- rbanffy 1mo agoThey all do, but none is visual. A visual interface would intercept block reads and writes. Now that I mentioned it, I might know what to do with one of those LED panels.
- dmitrygr 1mo agoThis seems....wrong? In the start it is writing over data in the start of the disk that has not been read/relocated (some non-free sectors NEVER light up as "Read", only as "writen") which would cause their data to be lost.
- raffael_de 1mo agowhat a delight it was to behold this visualized process of reinstalling order. the music of the hard disk's seeks went from anarchy to harmony. watching the defragmentation felt like taking a cold shower after sweating all day long ...
- atombender 1mo agoNorton Speed Disk [1] for DOS was more satisfying to watch because it would visualize reads and writes. So you'd see it grab blocks and then smush them together into contiguous areas. The Windows version was not, as I recall, as satisfying. [1] https://youtu.be/-T712Wbc6a0 https://youtu.be/-T712Wbc6a0
- M95D 1mo agoYou should see Norton Speed Disk for Windows defrag a DriveSpace volume! It's two step process.
- BugsJustFindMe 1mo agoSpeed Disk for Mac was even better because it used fun colors and _really_ showed things moving around. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUKvTe1q7CE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUKvTe1q7CE
- nirui 1mo agoFuck! Why I'm just staring at it like I did ~20 years ago. It's not even real! And it blue screens?
- sebazzz 1mo agoI do (not) miss the part where it restarts halfway because something got written to disk.
- helph67 1mo ago"Vopt is a well-known, safe, and fast defragger for Windows. Previously shareware the author has provided a free serial number for everyone before he passed away." https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/vopt.html https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/vopt.html
- antisol 1mo agoFAIL: I got all the way up to 11% on the C drive and it didn't restart from scratch due to a disk write even once.