Defragmenting your Windows PC

When you save a new file on your PC, it occupies space on your hard drive. When you make changes to the file, increasing file size in the process, it saves the old data back to the same space on the hard drive, and the additional data on another part of the drive. When you open up the same file, it then retrieves the data from two separate places on your hard disk.

The above paragraph is the simplest way to describe fragmentation, which may cause poor performance, slower startup and shutdown and, in some cases, system crashes. If you notice a degradation in your system’s performance, fragmentation may be a possible cause. To remedy this, you have to defragment your hard disk.

Before defragmenting, you should make sure that you have time to run the entire process, as it will take anywhere from 30 minutes up to an hour, depending on the size of your hard disk, the level of fragmentation and the last time you defragmented the drive. To ensure that defragmenting will not constantly stop during the middle of the process, you should turn off all running programs on your system tray, including your antivirus, and disable your screensaver. Just make sure to turn your antivirus on again after defragmenting.

Windows XP comes with its own, easy-to-use disk defragmenter. Windows XP’s Disk Defragmenter is a “lite” version of Diskeeper Corporation’s flagship software, Diskeeper. With Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced improvements to Disk Defragmenter, including allowing the utility to run at scheduled times and even when the PC is in use.

To run the utility, go to Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Defragmenter.

Select the drive you want to defragment, then click Analyze.

This will analyze the drive for fragmentation and recommend that you defrag if the level of fragmentation is of a certain percentage. If the fragmentation level is high, you can start the defragmentation process by clicking Defragment.

There are a slew of commercial and free defrag utilities with more advanced features than the default Windows defrag utility. The commercial products include the previously mentioned Diskeeper, PerfectDisk and O&O Defrag. The free products include Auslogics DiskDefrag, the command-line utility Contig, the Java-based JKDefrag and PageDefrag, which runs at startup and attempts to defrag system files that are in use when the PC boots up. Microsoft now maintains Contig and PageDefrag, both products of Winternals, which it acquired last June 2006.

No matter what tool you’re using, you should regularly defragment your hard drive to avoid performance-related problems.

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