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‘Slow computers’ is the most common employee complaint to IT helpdesks, according to a survey of 100 IT directors.
‘Lost passwords’ ranked second and ‘system crashes’ third in the study commissioned by Diskeeper Corporation and B2B research house Vanson Bourne.
But organisations continue to ignore one of the most common causes of slow computers and system crashes – fragmented hard drives.
Over two thirds (69%) of IT directors surveyed do not consider defragmentation a priority, and over half (56%) do not have processes in place to ensure regular defragmentation.
Sue Cantwell, managing director EMEA, Diskeeper Corporation, said: ”Fragmentation happens to a hard disk as soon as you save, change, or delete files. The changes that you save to a file are often stored at a location on the hard disk that’s different from the original file. Further changes are saved to even more locations. Both the file and the hard disk itself become fragmented, and your computer slows down as it has to search in many different places just to open up the file.”
The survey saw poor performance cited as the reason behind 33% of PC refreshes, a further indication of the level of waste in many IT departments.
Addressing fragmentation increases the lifespan of equipment significantly, and Cantwell says many of their firm’s clients are able to delay hardware upgrades for up to five years.
”Fragmentation is something that can be easily and inexpensively prevented by disk optimisation software,” she said. ”Organisations in the UK can easily save their employees precious time and helpdesk resources by running this type of software witih little to no overhead. The cost to a large enterprise could easily run into the hundreds of thousands. The benefits of taking this simple step include lower backup times, quicker anti-virus scans, faster boot up times and greener drives.”