Often when someone comes to me with a computer slow down I ask if they
have "defragged" lately. Usually, they respond with a quizzical look
and a question of "what does that mean?"
Well in a nutshell, your computer likes to read data from your hard
drive in a straight line. In other words, it likes to read 1,2,3,4,5.
Unfortunately, however, due to power outages, creating and deleting
files, your hard drive starts reading something like this: 1,4,2,3,5
Defragmenting your drive puts everything back in order and the computer
can more efficiently read data – which makes for a faster hard drive
and overall computing experience.
The way to defragment in Windows 98/2000 or XP is to simply open up My Computer, then right click on one of your hard drives and choose Properties. Then Hit the Tools Tab. In the middle of this screen is a Defragment Now button.
On the screen that appears, just select the drive you want to defrag and then hit the defragment button.
If you’ve never defragmented before, this could take a long time so do
it as you are heading out for lunch or leaving for the day. When you
return, you should come back to a fresh and hopefully faster hard
disk/computer.
As a side note, I have been using Perfectdisk for my defragmenting
needs. It is a more powerful defragmenter in that it optimizes the
files and allows you to schedule automatic defrags. By the way, Amazon has a rebate offer on Perfectdisk
But also, a discussion on Lifehacker points to a freeware version of
O&O defrag which is also an excellent defrag tool that you can
download at MajorGeeks. |MG| Free Download – O&O Defrag 2000 Freeware Edition 3.5.562
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