Defragment Your Hard Drive

I'm sure everyone has heard that it is important to defragment their hard drive. People used to say they were going to optimize their hard drive, but now the common term is to defragment.

What does it mean to defragment? Well, if you imagine your hard drive as a bunch of little boxes (with spaces being empty boxes), an unfragmented hard drive would have all of the boxes for 1 program or file together like this:

1 1 1 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4

Well, what happens when you delete program or file number 3? The resulting set up is like this:

1 1 1 2 2 2 2         4 4 4 4

Now lets say that you make a new document and save it to your hard drive. It is a very large document. The resulting set up would be

1 1 1 2 2 2 2 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 5 5 5

Now you can see that if you wanted to open up file 5, the computer would have to look in two different places before it can open it. This is a simple example of what a fragmented hard drive is. It is very possible that after going an extended period of time without defragmenting your hard drive, you could get a hard drive that looks like this

1  21  34  2  2  34  4  5  6  34  21  1  34  9  12

If the computer wanted to open file 34, it would have to look in 4 places. It gets much worse than this.

To defragment is to take all of the fragmented pieces and put them back in order. Windows comes with a defragmenting program. You can also get third party software such as Norton Utilities which comes with a defragmenting program.

NOTE: If you are using FAT32, make sure you use a defragmenting program that is FAT32 compatible. If you use a program that isn't compatible, you can lose your data and mess up your whole system.

The only thing that is important to remember when trying to defragment a hard drive is not to use your computer when you are doing this. Every time you open or close a file/program, something is written to the hard drive. When the defragmenting program senses that the hard drive has been modified in even the slightest manor, it will restart. Things you have to look out for are virus checkers that run in the background.

It is best to close down all open applications, including programs that are resident in your system tray. You can also press Ctrl-Alt-Del to manually close some programs. When everything is closed, just run Defrag. It is located in the Start Menu under Programs --> Accessories --> System Tools. You can view the options and change the way Defrag does its job. It is probably best though if you are a novice to just leave it the way it is.

If you follow those steps, you will do a basic defragmenting.

INVISUS ICare System optimizations inculde defragmenting your computer.

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