Windows comes with a collection of house cleaning tools, including ScanDisk, Disk Defragmenter and Disk Cleanup, to help keep your disk in peak working order.

Why should you bother with the housework? A couple of reasons. First, disks are hard working, mechanical devices and, like all mechanical devices, prone to failure. A little preventative maintenance can warn you of potential problems and fix minor glitches before they can do damage to your data.

Second, the way files are organised on your drive has a perceptible impact on the performance of your computer. If your files are stored neatly, end-to-end, without fragmentation, reading and writing to the disk is speedier.

What is file fragmentation?

Sometimes when you install a program or create a data file, the file ends up chopped up into chunks and stored in multiple locations on the disk. This is called fragmentation.

Here’s a simple solution to file fragmentation: use Windows Disk Defragmenter:

1. Defragment Your Hard Disk

Imagine you are in a shopping mall, and the person you are with wants to visit fifteen different shops. However, this person ends up walking you up and down the mall six times. Does that make sense? Of course not - as human beings, we like to do things in order to save time.

When your hard drive becomes fragmented, it is literally wasting time by looking in all kinds of places on the disk for all of the pieces of one file. Defragmenting your drive is a great solution to speed up your computer as it puts all the files together in order.

• Click Start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Defragmenter
• Click the drives you want to defrag and click Analyze
• Click Defragment

2. Defragment you Hard Disk on Boot

To make windows XP start more quickly, you can defragment your boot files. This will decrease the time it takes for your computer to boot.

Boot defragment should be enabled by default; however, it might not be enabled on your computer. To ensure that boot defragment is enabled:
• Hold the Windows Key and press R.
• Type in Regedit
• Go to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction
• Ensure the Enable string value is set as Y
• Exit the Registry
• Reboot

Defrag works by moving slabs of data to unused parts of the disk, in order to open up a large free section of space. It then assembles the fragmented parts of a file and writes them in one complete piece to the cleared space; it then does the same with the next file; and so on until the entire disk is defragmented.

Rate this:
2.1

No Comments
Services