This website shows you various system utilities that you can use to make your PC perform “like new” again.
How to Defragment a Hard Disk
A Brief Look on the Structure of a Hard Disk
An analogy between a computer's hard disk and a file cabinet can be easily made. Just like a file cabinet, your hard disk stores and organizes files according to several factors such as their name, date, size and so forth. And just like a file cabinet, with the addition of more and more files over time, your hard disk will become less organized, there will be a lot of unused files on it and all this growing mess will cause your computer to lose performance.
Luckily, just like with a file cabinet, you can clean your hard drive through a process called “defragmentation” or simply “defrag” as it is often called.
What is Defragmentation?
Under Windows and several other popular operating systems, whenever you install a program it will be broken up over several memory clusters on your hard drive and this usually resorts to performance slow downs because of the increased time it takes for all the information to be gathered up.
When you defrag a hard disk, you essentially gather up these bits of information and reorganize your hard disk memory from scratch. Nothing is lost, it's just moved to a more convenient place on your hard. So now that we've cleared up the concept of defragmentation, let's see how we can perform it.
The Windows Disk Defragmenter
Because of the rising demand, programs dealing with disk defrag have recently popped up like mushrooms after the rain. Some are more reliable than others, but most of them cost a lot of money. Luckily, Microsoft has implemented such a program in the Windows operating system so we'll discuss about this one, since it's free and everyone has access to it.
In order to fire up the disk defragmenter program, click the “Start” button, point to “All Programs”, then choose “Accessories” from the drop down, point to “System Tools” and then click on the Disk Defragmenter button.
Before you start the program however, it's advisable to shut down any other programs running actively or in the background (these can include downloaders, browsers, antivirus programs, firewalls and so forth…if you are worried that you might be vulnerable to attacks of any sort during this time, simply disconnect your Internet provider during the defrag process).
You now have multiple options at the disk defragmenter screen. You can choose to either analyze or defragment a disk partition. Choose analyze first in order to see if your hard disk (or that particular partition) requires a defrag. If the colored bar under the “Estimated disk usage before defragmentation” has a lot of red lines after the analysis, then you definitely need a defrag (red lines are fragmented files).
Conclusion
It's not necessary to defrag a hard disk; you may run programs perfectly smooth without need of such a process. However if you feel that your system's performance is lower than it should, a disk defrag can oftentimes make the difference.
It's advisable to defrag your hard disk every month or so, if not weekly. It usually doesn't take too long (the defrag time depends on the size of your hard drive, your PC's processing power, the amount of fragmented files that need to be fixed and the amount of time that passed since the last defrag or format) and you can fire it up while you make a cup of coffee or while you watch the news, only to come back to a fresh new hard disk that will thank you for the clean-up.