SHOULD YOU DEFRAG REGULARLY?

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If your files are severe fragmented, then I don’t care what you do to your computer, it will not run faster or access files any quicker. Before you defrag your hard drive, you must first run Windows XP’s equivalent of Scan Disk.

• Open My Computer
• Right click on the drive you wish to check and select the Tools Tab

• Now click on the Check Now button. You will be given certain options for which you will need to choose which one or both you prefer. You may receive a message telling you that Check Disk needs to access certain windows files and will have to run the next time you restart windows. Once you are done with this task…it is time to defrag your hard disk.

Defragmenting your hard drive is very simple. Defragmentation is a process that Windows uses to combine all the data on your drive to align the data in such as way as to allow faster access to your programs and files. It also allows Windows to write new files to a suitable area on the hard drive.

In technical terms, your hard disk in broken down into clusters of 4kbytes to 16kbytes therefore, when Windows writes a file to your computer that is 100 kbytes in size, it must either find an area that is 100 kbytes in size or break the data down in smaller pieces throughout the hard drive. Consequently, if you need to retrieve this data from your hard drive and it is all in one place, it is faster for the read head on your hard drive to swallow this up than it would be if it has to go to a half dozen places instead.

Today’s hard drives are very large multi-gigabyte drives and it is very time consuming to defrag these large drives. Please do not let this be an excuse for not defragging your drives on a regular basis. I. Speedy, run defrag on my hard disk every night around 2am on a schedule along with Anti-Spyware, and Anti virus software.

TO USE DEFRAG:

• First, you need to ensure that all other programs are turned off and that no other programs are running in the background other than the necessary things such as anti virus and anti spyware software.
• If you have not scheduled defrag to run on a specific schedule…Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Defragmenter
• Then, select the drive that you want to defragment and click Analyze (this is pretty much the same even on most third party programs) which will look at the drive to analyze whether the drive needs to be defragged or not.
• If this is the case, Click Close to close the report and if the analysis report recommends Defragmentation, click Defrag.

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