Defragging and the benefits of defragging your pc

Defragging your hard drive will speed up your computer if you have a lot of fragmented files. Now let me try and explain fragmented files a little be before I continue.

First think of your hard drive as a book where the writer does not leave any room for addition in chapters. As soon as he finishes writing a chapter he picks up on the next chapter on the next line. So if he needs to make additions to a chapter that he has already written he will have to add it to the very end and update his table of contents so you know where to get for the rest of the chapter. Hope the made since!

Now you start a word document and you write about half of it and then close it and start an excel document, you save that and then modify your word document again. The physical storage locations on your hard drive are going to be word->excel->word and our table of contents is going to tell use where to find the entire word document which is around the excel document.

Now that you hopfully understand that think of the reader or eye trying to read a document that the spread across then entire physical drive and you can imagine how it could take longer.

Defragging takes these files that are split up across the entire hard drive and organizes them next to each other so the eye doesn’t have to travel all over the place to access a file.

Phew! with all that being said you should only need to defrag your hard drive if you do a lot of program installs and unintalls or if it has been a year since you defragged before. Defragging never hurts your computer but be prepared to have it spend a good 4 hours defragging a large hard drive.

Now how do you defrag your hard drive, well that part is easy:

1. Open My Computer
2. Right Click on the drive you want to defrag, usually C:
3. Click Properties
4. Click the Tools tab
5. Click “Defragment Now…”
6. New program will  open
7. Select your hard drive, usually C:
8. Click the “Defragment” button

Your computer will now begin to defragment your hard drive, during this time you should not use your computer because it will be running very slow and you could cause the defragmenting process to run slower.

Well I hope this post will answer your question about deframentation..