Thursday, March 5, 2009

Improve your computers performance by defragging

One of the things that can slow down your hard drive is when your files become fragmented. This happens when your files are not stored as contiguous blocks on your hard drive.

Let's say, for example, that you have a 5 page Word document. To you, it looks like one file, and it would make sense for it to be stored on your hard drive (the main drive of your computer) as one block. Sometimes this doesn't happen, and your file can be stored all around your hard drive (there is a part of your hard drive that keeps track of where the different parts of the file are stored). You can imagine how this can slow things down; the first page of your file is on one part of your hard drive, the next 2 pages on another part, and the last 2 pages somewhere else. Your computer is fast, but it's going to be a lot slower when it has to go looking around different places on your hard drive to put the file together.

Solving this problem is easy. To defragment your disk, go to Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter, then click Defragment. NOTE: this process could take a while, maybe even a few hours.

Legal stuff: This information is for general educational purposes only. Use at your own risk, and I can't be held responsible if something goes wrong. If you have questions consult a computer technician.

1 comment:

  1. A safe and effortless option to defrag drives which are severely fragmented and may also be running out of free space is to use Diskeeper. Just set it on automatic mode and go about your work as usual, it defrags neatly without requiring any manual input.

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