Defragment your Hard Disk Drive
To understand the Defragmentation process, first we need to understand how Hard Disk
Drives store data. Hard Disk Drives store their data in sectors as shown in the
diagram below.
The section highlighted above is one sector of a Hard Disk Drive. This is a scaled down model. A real Hard Disk Drive would have thousands of sectors.
Initially data saves in a sequential order as you may well expect.
Once you start deleting files, folders and programs sectors become empty. This means the needle which reads the data on the Hard Disk Drive has further to move in order to read the data.
Defragmenting the Hard Disk Drive moves data back into sequential sectors, therefore making the time the needle takes to read data shorter and your PC run faster.
To Defragment your Computers Hard Disk Drive take the following steps;
For Microsoft Windows XP;
- Double Click ‘My Computer’ from your Desktop or go to ‘Start’ and ‘My Computer’.
- Right-Click on your Hard Disk Drive (Usually called Local Disk (C:)) and select ‘Properties’.
- Select the ‘Tools’ tab and then select ‘Defragment Now’
- You can then select ‘Analyze’ and see whether or not your Hard Disk Drive needs Defragmenting
- Then select ‘Defragment’ if you would like to begin the process. It should take under half an hour on most machine but times may vary.
For Microsoft Windows Vista the process is almost exactly the same. The only difference is you need to go to Start > Computer and right-click on ‘OS C:)’
The rest of the process is identical.
Microsoft Product Screen Shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation
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