>>Well, after defragmenting, HD is burned much LESS because no file fragmenting. Did you thought about this?
>
>Pure speculation on your part.

It is well-known fact. Go to some hardware forum and ask this question.

>
>Which is better: defragmenting the same files every day, hour upon hour ... or once a month, on demand ?

You can always schedule defragmentator to do it automatically once/month. Can you? DO it once and you will not have to run defragmentator manually every time. It would save you a bit of time, specially if you have several machines. ;-)

>>IMO, I do not think MS would trouble about such services if it is not worth in general. If MS does this, as you said, because some deal with disk manufacturers, MS would be quickly sued or burned by users.
>
>The "disk manufactures" reference was a joke.

Be careful with such "jokes" - certain people interpret them seriously < g >

>
>>Words like yours in many cases start flame wars against MS for no real reasons. Please, it is so old story, I'm tired by that...
>
>I think a have a reason. I do not like these seldom documented "features". If I knew up front what they were, what they did, and how to turn them off, that would be a different matter.
>

They're not seldom docummented. Just read manual. (When did you read Windows help last time, BTW? ;-) Do you think MS should put a note about this feature of disk defragmenter on every help page? < vbg > What about other features? Help file is not a place for "did you know" tips.

>In the case of WinME, it made the system unstable;

HOW?

>I had to trawl the Web to find out how people were dealing with these configuration issues. A lot of time was spent dealing with "no real reasons". The number of running tasks that are actually needed vs what is loaded "by default" is surpisingly small; the rest just cripples your system.
>

That's not true. On my development machine I have 20 processes runing automatically with certain period. Despite that, I have no slow downs and task manager shows 99% for system process load most of the time, and when some task starts, it does not slows down my work. If you have such slow downs, it might be also a hardware problem (not memory or disk itself, buts some combinations of hardware).
PLEASE, do not throw complains, just go and configure your Windows properly.

>I could now start in on how all this is about "more memory" upgrades ... but I won't.

I have 64 MB of memory.

>
>For you the story might be "old"; for some of us, we have to deal with Users who still haven't heard the "story", and we have to figure out what is "wrong" with their system.

This is old story and it exists since the time when computers started to be used in offices.

"Users" should NOT configure Windows. Good company always have system administrator that does this job. If users complain because mentioned by you defragmentator problem, it is bad work of system administrator. If company saves and do not have system administrator - well, after some time such "saving" might turn against the company.

It is not the MS - they just could not satisfy EVERYONE by default Windows comfiguration, because too different needs related to different uses of computer. Anyway, MS gives you a lot of options to configure it by self. Just CONFIGURE it, instead of complaining about default configuration.