INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
It been a while since I defragged — years, probably, because these days for a number of reasons computers don''t really need to
But perhaps it is we who need to defrag
And what better way to defrag your brain after a long week than by watching the strangely satisfying defragmentation process taking place on
a simulated DOS machine, complete with fan and HDD noise
That what you can do with this Twitch stream, which has defrag.exe running 24/7 for
your enjoyment.
I didn''t realize how much I missed the sights and sounds of this particular process
I&ve always found ASCII visuals soothing, and there was something satisfying about watching all those little blocks get moved around to form
What were they doing down there on the lower right hand side of the hard drive anyway That what I&d like to know.
Afterwards I&d launch a
state of the art game like Quake 2 just to convince myself it was loading faster.
There also that nice purring noise that a hard drive would
make (and which is recreated here)
At least, I thought of it as purring
For the drive, it probably like being waterboarded
But I did always enjoy having the program running while keeping everything else quiet, perhaps as I was going to bed, so I could listen to
its little clicks and whirrs
Sometimes it would hit a particularly snarled sector and really go to town, grinding like crazy
That how you knew it was working.
The typo is, no doubt, deliberate.
The whole thing is simulated, of course
There isn''t really just an endless pile of hard drives waiting to be defragged on decades-old hardware for our enjoyment (except in my box
But the simulation is wonderfully complete, although if you think about it you probably never used DOS on a 16:9 monitor, and probably not
We can sacrifice authenticity so we don''t have to windowbox it.
The defragging will never stop at TwitchDefrags, and that comforting to me
It means I don''t have to build a 98SE rig and spend forever copying things around so I have a nicely fragmented volume
Honestly they should include this sound on those little white noise machines
For me this is definitely better than whale noises.
