Many may not know what “fragmentation” is, but by “defragmenting” your hard drive regularly, you can increase your computers performance and reliability.
As files are saved and deleted each day, the hard drive becomes fragmented. Fragmentation means that instead of saving a file in a single contiguous block, the computer breaks it up over multiple locations on the hard drive.
As you can guess, reading a fragmented file stored in multiple locations is much slower and demanding on your hard drive than reading a single continuous one.
Ideally, you should check for fragmentation once a week, but you can get by checking just once a month.
Two clues that a drive has become fragmented are:
- Sluggish performance.
- Frequent application crashes.
Defragmention can sometimes be a slow process taking a few hours. It is best to do it at the end of the day so defragmentation can complete without interference. To prepare, close all programs and turn off any screen saver and power saver settings. Your computer should not have anything else running when you defragment.
In Windows 98, ME, and XP, go to Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools and choose Disk Defragmenter. Pick the drive you want to defragment and click “OK”. Then just follow the displayed instructions. If your disk doesn't need defragmenting, Disk Defragmenter will give you the option to continue or cancel.
About
the author:
Bruce
Padmore is the Co-Founder of Leap
Frog Solutions, Inc. Leap Frog Solutions is an IT Service Provider
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