Defragging Your Hard Drive

Defragmentation is one of the easiest ways to increase the speed of your computer. When your computer uses files, it has a habit of splitting them up in to different clusters of data on your hard drive which results in something called fragmentation. Rather than the data being stored all in one place, it is dotted all over the hard drive. This makes it difficult for the computer to use a file that has been fragmented as it has to access the file from several places on the disk. This results in slower loading times which can be increased by defragmenting the hard drive.

A disk defragmenter is designed to organise your hard disk back in to some kind of order so that your computer has to do less work and hence becomes more responsive. I have in the past talked about this subject but made the mistake of suggested the defrag utility supplied with Windows; whilst it does do a good enough job, it is undeniably slow. For this reason, I am recommending the Defragger application that is free to use and can be downloaded from www.defraggler.com.

Once installed, just select the drive that you wish to defragment and you will be presented with a pie chart depicting the used and free space on the drive - to get the most efficiency from the application try to ensure that you have at least 15% free space available. Now click the analyse button and the application will return a map of your hard drive showing the scale of the fragmentation on your drive so that you can be sure that defragging is actually needed. Providing you are satisfied, just click on the defrag button and the application will work away in the background to restore your hard drive to some kind of order. Whilst in action, it will provide you with a status bar and an envolving map so you can the progress of it.

The entire process will take typically around an hour or so depending on the size of hard disk, degree of fragmentation and speed of computer. You are welcome to carry on using your machine whilst your data is sorted and there is even the option to select a 'background' mode which will result in the whole process taking longer but your machine will suffer less slowdown. The application can also be selected to defragment individual files or folders therefore saving time if you only want to correct the most severely affected files.

Defragmenting should not be done everyday, I really must stress that it should only be occasionally. It is not really worth running such a utility on a daily basis. I've know people that have and, to be honest, any time saved in loading files is offset by the time it takes to run the utility. You will always have fragmentation on your hard drive so the trick is to ensure that it doesn't get to the stage where it is adversely affecting your machine and blasting this utility through every couple of months should do the trick.