PC exercise program - Day 2 - disk defragmentation

By Fred Litt, Family Technology Associates 

Defragment your hard drive

You hard drive (C:) is a circular metallic platter that spins when it stores or retrieves information.  Every time you access the Internet, view your email, download files, or do just about anything else, this platter has to spin to locate your requested information.  Unfortunately, Windows does not efficiently place files for speedy access. 

To save time during operation, Windows actually splits up your larger files and scatters them all over the hard drive.  The problem is that the next time you access a scattered or ‘fragmented’ file, the hard drive must continually spin to find each of these fragments,  piece them together, then allow you to use the reconstructed file.   As such, files are scattered inefficiently all over the hard drive.  When files are very scattered, you will actually hear the hard drive spinning.

To increase the speed of accessing your files (and to reduce the wear and tear of your hard drive), you can defragment your files.  Perform the following:

Click START > PROGRAMS > ACCESSORIES > SYSTEM TOOLS > DISK DEFRAGMENTER

The Disk Defragmenter window will display.  Click Defragment.  That’s it.  This program will run a while and will let you know when it’s finished.  Below, you can see a visual representation of how files are positioned on  your hard drive before and after disk defragmentation.

FYI:  While this product does a decent job, I really like the Defragment utility in Norton Systemworks.

This article may be reproduced with permission of Fred Litt, Family Technology Associates. Contact Fred at 201-315-4943 fred@FamilyTechnology.com for details.