I remember defragging my 486 hard drive in the late 90s as a kind of fun, just as it was fun to turn a pile of dirty dishes into a clean plate or a level full of living Doom enemies into dead ones. That Windows app depicted the hard disk slowly changing from dirty navy to a clean sky blue via segments that turned red when picked up. But the sound was also physical, reminding us that digital data exists in the real world.

If you, too, are feeling a strange twinge of nostalgia at the act of defragging a hard disk drive, there is good news. Engineer Dennis Morello has recreated the experience of defragging the C drive in Windows 98.

In a blog post describing this fun and quirky act, Morello says, "One of the biggest challenges was implementing a defragmentation algorithm that felt real. The custom algorithm he came up with randomly selects the number of clusters to process at once and adjusts its speed based on which fictional drive is selected, from C to F (taking an estimated 17 minutes at the longest). The sound effects are synchronized with the visualizer and change according to the speed of the selected drive. Basically, putting effort into something a little silly is more work than one might imagine, but I've been working on this the whole time I've been writing this article, and it reminded me of what I was doing back in 1998.

Now that that's done, it's time to give the new Fallout - Fallout 2 - a try, or this Thief: Or try "Thief: The Dark Project" which I've heard so much about, and which you can experience at defrag98.com.