Daily fragmentation is a bit obsessive, even for windows.
Actually, you shouldn't have to defrag a moden Windows NTFS-formatted drive much at all, either.
And to the earlier poster: yes a LOT of the tools out there, for Windows and Mac, prey on people that I dub computer hypochondriacs. These are people who obsessively scrutinize every beep, grind and whir for the slightest sign of trouble, and overreact by running all kinds of utilities.
On a Windows machine, you really only need an enabled firewall,
one up to date virus scanner, and
one installation of Spyware removal software. The OS pretty much has everything else that it needs. Running more than this gives you diminishing returns, and little or no benefit is gained while your PC ends up slowing down.
On a Mac you need... well, nothing else, really. For now, OS X takes care of itself, and anything else at all is just superfluous. Sometimes TechTool and the like is useful for diagnosing rare serious problems, and if you get AppleCare, I'd say don't throw away the disk that they send you. But as long as you're running the included OS X disk utility about once a month, I would bet you'll probably never need TechTool.
In either case, if you go overboard, all you're doing is throwing money away and slowing your computer down to boot. The Nortons and Dvoraks and Gibsons of the world make their money by fear-mongering. They take legitimate risks and blow them way out of proportion, and scare the uninformed into buying package after package of diagnostic software, and sometimes the software ends up doing more harm than good.
I've been called to houses of people who complain that their system has slowed down and that it "must be spyware." Most of the time it is. But about 10 percent of the cases I see, it's people who have installed at least two virus scanners, at least two spyware blockers, and they have Norton utilities running in the background. In these instances, there's more CPU time and available memory devoted to finding out how the computer is doing than there is begin devoted to actual, productive work. A virus couldn't run if it wanted to... heck, a legitimate application can barely run if IT wants to! And inevitably, these people freak out when I tell them their system would run a lot faster if they got rid of the always-running diagnostic junk, and slimmed down to one virus scanner and one spyware blocker.
And that's fine with me. If they refuse, I point out that if they insist they know more about the situation than I do, then they shouldn't have called me. There's nothing wrong, and nothing I can do for them.
