01-15-2012, 08:18 PM
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How To Defrag Your Computer
How to Defrag a Computer
Over a given period of time and usage, the files of a computer can become disorganized, and can cause the computer to become very slow. When this is the case, it means that your hard drive has become fragmented and needs to be defragmented to regain its peak performance. In this article I will try to explain fragmentation, its cause, and how to do it.
What Is Fragmentation, and What Causes It?
The hard drive of of a computer can be thought of as a storehouse with a large number of rooms. Each of these rooms has a specific address which has been assigned to it by the file system of your computer to organize information in.
When information is stored by your computer on the hard drive, it needs a certain room, and room size for these files, and the file system gives an address to each of these rooms. Ideally, all these rooms would be adjacent to each other and be read sequentially when you want to retrieve these files.
However, sometimes parts of each file may be stored at different locations and be somewhat scattered among several rooms. Now instead of reading these files in order of each room, your computer may have to read a few rooms here, and a few there to compile all the information relative to these particular files. Time is a bit wasted as the computer has to look for these bits and pieces of information. The same thing can happen when writing files also.
But your hard drive can read from only one room at a time. So it can easily be seen why this would slow down the speed of disc reading and writing. You now need to do some defragmentation. In addition to defragging, it also recommended that you also run a registry cleaner, which is also very effective in speeding up your computer.
How Often Should You Defrag Your Computer?
Because fragmentation naturally occurs in file systems, it cannot be avoided. And as you use your computer, you or your operating system is constantly moving files around your hard drive. If your computer is left on all the time, you may probably never need to defrag it. This is so because most operating systems will do defragmentation automatically every two weeks in the middle of the night.
If your computer is not left on at all times then you should defrag it every two weeks if used sparingly, and every week if used heavily.
How To Defrag Your Computer?
Fragmentation is a known problem with file systems, and because of that every major operating system has a way to defrag your computer without the need of purchasing software. This means that you can do it yourself if you are not afraid to.
To defrag if you have the Windows operating system – do the following:
• Click your start menu, and select ‘Computer’
• Right-click the disk you wish to defrag, and select ‘Properties’
• Click the ‘Tools’ tab at the top, and select ‘Defragment now…’
• Simply click ‘Defragment disk’ (if you are not sure whether you need to or not, you can select ‘Analyze disk’ to check)
In some cases you may need administrative access to the computer that is to be defragmented.
Last edited by skalamanga; 01-15-2012 at 08:29 PM..
Reason: To correct some mistakes
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