My computer has been running very slowly lately, and a friend said my hard drive might be fragmented. He told me that I should “defrag”. What does this mean? How will it help?
Hard drive fragmentation refers to the state of a disk that’s endured a significant amount of usage over a period of time and, to put it simply, is full of virtual holes. An overly fragmented hard drive makes your computer work overtime on any tasks that involve reading to and writing from the hard drive.
When you fire up a brand new computer with a fresh hard drive and start saving documents, photos, songs, and other personal files, Windows does its best to record the little pieces of each file together, in sequential order. When all the parts of your files are kept together and in order, Windows is able to read those files very quickly.
As you add, delete and move files over time your hard drive begins to fill up, virtual holes begin to develop throughout the data that’s stored on the disk. Windows begins to break your files up into smaller pieces and keep them all in different places. The next time you access one of these files, Windows must fetch each piece from each individual storage location and reassemble the file as a whole. As you can imagine, this takes a lot more time and effort when the pieces of a file are spread apart from each other.
Windows XP comes with utility called Disk Defragmenter that can clean up a fragmented hard drive. To use this utility, click Start → All Programs → Accessories → System Tools → Disk Defragmenter. The defrag program will start up.
The first order of business is to have Disk Defragmenter analyze your hard drive and determine whether or not it needs to be defragmented. Click on the “Analyze” button to start the analysis. If your hard drive needs to be defragmented, Disk Defragmenter will show you this message:
Click on Defragment to start defragmenting the contents of your hard drive. Disk Defragmenter will show you a color-coded map symbolizing the layout of your hard disk, and the percentage of completion will display at the bottom of the Disk Defragmenter window.
Disk defragmenter won’t really free up much space, but it can really give you a speed boost if your system is in need of its services.
[tags]defrag,Windows XP,hard drive,disk defragmenter[/tags]
