Fragmentation on realtively new systems with 7200+rpm drives with lots of space is largely over-rated in the harm or slowness. Your game files fragmentation was probably due to not having a large amount of continuous space even though your EXISTING files before the install were unfragmented (the files which pre-existed were continuous, but located in clumps spread around the drive space.)
It's absolutely impossible to keep the dive TOTALLY unfragmented unless you are willing to wack years off your drive's service life. Having a fixed size swap file does a lot toward preventing fragmentation. File access slow downs which are measureable are when the head has to move large distances between fragmented sectors. It's possible for file portions to be fragmented, but the additional head movement to assemble the fragments might be very small, so no real gain from defragging. Even though the Windows defragger is not very efficient and leaves some things to be desired (like compressing files which belong to the same application together) I've found one thing it gets right is WHEN you should do it (generally speaking.) Done too often the gain is not worth the time and wear.
-Pv-
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