When you bought your computer, you were no doubt thrilled with its performance and speed. You make great use of it, and each day you realise what a boon it is in helping you get your work done smoothly and efficiently. However, as time passes, it begins to get slower and performance issues crop up. It can then become more of an annoyance than a boon, and you even find that these glitches that arise tend to impact your work.
Why Defragment Your Computer
When you buy your computer, the hard drive, or memory of the computer, is clean and organised. However, as time goes by and you add and delete files and programs, there develop “gaps” as it were in the sequence of data stored on your computer. A part of a single file might exist at the beginning of the hard drive, and the rest could exist somewhere in the middle or towards the end of it, since “pockets’ of memory may not exist in order.
In the long run, your computer becomes slower as these file clusters are not stored sequentially and when you access a file or program, your computer might need to look all over the place to find and open it properly. When you defragment your computer, what you are actually doing is setting this problem right. The process of defragmentation places all your data in order with free space at the end, so that data storage and retrieval is more organized. This, in turn, speeds up your computer and gets you back the performance that you enjoyed at first.
How To Do A Computer Defragment
- Uninstall any programs that you do not require or applications whose licenses have expired. If there are any files to be deleted, do this prior to defragmentation.
- Close all programs that are currently running, except essential Windows services.
- If you have any programs that are scheduled to run, cancel these. This could include virus scans and the like.
- Click on Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools and choose Disk Cleanup.
- Perform a clean-up of all temporary files that are shown up with Disk Cleanup.
- Click on Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools and choose Disk Defragmenter.
- Choose the drive to be C: and click on the “Defragment” button.
- Your computer will take many hours to analyse the fragmented files and defragment them. Do not switch off your computer during this process.
- Once the defragment is done, you will be able to see how much free space you really have, and your computer’s performance will be boosted.
Points To Remember When Defragmenting Your Computer
- It is good to run a disk defragment task once in three weeks. This will keep your computer’s file system healthy.
- Before doing an actual disk defragment, use the “Analyze” feature that comes with this tool. You will thereby know whether you really need to defragment your computer or not as running this task too frequently can also have adverse effects.
- Performing a disk defragment on other drives, including external hard drives, is also essential in order to ensure maximum performance.
- Do not defragment memory cards, MP3 players, flash drives or any chips that store information on them. Instead of increasing performance, you will risk ruining the device itself.