I have decided to start a series of post on Maintenance of a computer. The first segment I will do will be about de-fragmenting a computer. The reason for parts is because I want it to be like most people will have time for. I personally have lots of time to have a computer down 4 or 5 hrs to do maintenance on it but most people will busy lives or laptops that are in use all the time may not have this luxury. You may just have a hour or 2 at the most.
First off why defraging is important. When you use your computer install programs, games, rip music or any thing else that uses hard drive space you run the chance of "fragmenting" a file. A fragment happens when the hard drive put a part of a file on a different place on a hard drive other than right beside the other parts of the file. The reason this happens is because in most cases a Operation System i.e-Windows 7 doesn't know to put a file together it only knows to use the next open place on the hard drive. Defragmenting attempt to put the pieces together so that the hard drive doesn't have to search for all the parts to a file on a hard drive they are just right there thereby decreasing drive search time, which helps speed up a computer.
Option 1: Stock Program: The process of defraging is very simple. I will go over it in for Windows 7 because that is still the most popular OS other than a lot of people still using XP out there but the process is still similar. *First click on your windows button, then find and click on accessories folder in your programs list, next find System tools and click on it and then click on "dfrgui" this is your stock Defrag tool for windows. You will see a button that says defrag now or something to that effect, It does change from time to time so I can't say for sure what it will say for you.
Option 2: FREE Auslogic DeFrag tool: This is the method I use personally I like this tool and it is much more user friendly. It is a small program that you install and it creates a desktop Icon after you run it from the desk top it explains the rest. I like it also because it shows you which files it is moving and how the hard disk is looking before and after. This can be downloaded FREE by going to this website: http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/download/
NOTES*** Once you start defrag make sure you have time to let it finish if you have to interrupt it, Power goes out or other wise your run the risk of it moving a file that is important to system and if it doesn't move the whole file it will corrupt it and your system may stop working. If you have to stop it hit the stop button and it will stop after the next file is moved. Also allow time for this if you have a older computer and it has never been defraged before it can take an hour or more.
Thanks for reading this and I hope this helps you next will be scanning your hard drive for errors to improve speed.
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