Defragmentation

DO IT:  Monthly, or as necessary.

OK, now once you have cleaned your hard drive, removed installed programs, deleted your cookies and temporary Internet files, emptied your Recycle Bin, scanned your disk and performed a disk cleanup, you are finally ready to defrag! 

I like to think of my hard drive as a file cabinet.  It contains drawers, folders, and files within folders – just like an actual file cabinet. 

When your hard drive is empty (such as when your computer is brand new) it is easy to find an empty file drawer to store your files.  However, as you write and erase files over time, the files that have been erased leave holes, or gaps, in your hard drive (or file cabinet). 

Then, when have a large file to save, it is broken up into smaller pieces and stored in several empty spaces.  Or, in keeping with the file cabinet analogy, the contents of one file may be several different drawers! 

Instead of writing and reading files that are in one piece (or contiguous), the read/write head in the hard drive must jump all over the disk from fragment to fragment to access the file. This takes a lot of time!

There is a section of the hard drive containing what is called the File Allocation Table (FAT). It is a file system that keeps track of where all the files are stored on the hard drive. So your computer actually goes out to all the different “drawers” and puts the file together for you when you need it. 

Eventually what happens is there are many fragmented files and empty spaces scattered all over the disk. When this happens your hard drive is said to be very fragmented. The FAT has to work very hard to manage these chopped up files.

This fragmentation is "invisible" to the user.  The locations of the fragments are kept track of by the system. Over time, your computer spends more and more time working with the FAT to find all the pieces of the file you're attempting to access, thus slowing down your computer.  By the way, there's nothing you can do to prevent fragmentation.

Running a defragmentation program on your computer reorganizes the files on the hard drive so that each file is located in one contiguous space, or in one file in one drawer.  As a bonus, all the free space is grouped together on the disk as well.

A heavily fragmented drive can slow down your computer. 

Running this maintenance utility can help keep your computer running at top speed.

TIP:  Don't defragment a drive you want to use anytime soon. It can easily take a couple of hours on a large, fragmented drive.  However, if you use this utility monthly, it won’t take as long as the first time you do it. 

There are a couple of ways to access the defragment utility on your computer.  This is one of the simplest ways. 

Step 1:
Go to Start » Programs » Accessories » System Tools » Disk Defragmenter

Step 2:
Your hard drive/s should appear on the screen.  As you can see, I have one hard drives – C.  Use the Defragment command for each of the hard drives (if you have more than one), one at a time.  That’s it. . . you’re done!