I don’t think anything in my life today relaxes me the way that defragging an old Windows machine used to.
Defrag, or disk defragmentation, is a Windows utility that essentially makes order out of your hard drive. When a file is too large to fit on a section of a disk, it’s broken up into pieces (fragments) and stored in different places on a drive. Defragmentation, a kind of digital meditation, puts those pieces back together to improve system performance by reducing boot times, decreasing program loading times, and freeing up unused space. But that in and of itself doesn’t speak to what was so enjoyable about defragging: It was fun and soothing to watch.
There was something deeply satisfying about noticing your machine was running slowly, remembering you haven’t run disk defrag in a while, and once you’ve opened it, seeing that your disk fragmentation was high (lots of room for improvement!).
I spent countless hours throughout the 90s watching light blue blocks turn green, disappear, turn red, and magically transform into a darker blue. There’s a digital calm here. There’s a sense of progress and organization as if your life is being put in order.
While there are a lot of disk defragmentation videos on Youtube, most of are far too short. This video, however, clocks in at almost 20 minutes long. So take a deep breath, set this beauty to full screen, and let the Windows 98 Disk Defragmenter do it’s thing.
