Home Office Design Blog

Now comes the last step in keeping your computer and hard drive neat, tidy and free of errors. The process of defragmenting your hard drive can be time consuming but the benefits are more than worth it. Your PC will actually perform better with a drive that’s been defragmented properly. Wait though what is defragmentation you ask?

Ok imagine your hard disk is a standard music CD. When you buy the CD first all the songs are in the right order. Imagine after 8 weeks you play the CD and not only are the songs all mixed up but bits of one song are mixed with parts of another song. It’s all just a jumbled mess. Your CD player can’t cope and eventually just dies from exhaustion. Now you know that doesn’t happen with CDs but the scenario I just described here is exactly what happens to you hard drive over time. Information gets scattered all over the place and the mechanisms inside the drive have to work 10 times harder to retrieve and save data. The end result is a hard disk that dies prematurely.

Defragging (defragmenting) is the process of putting all the data on your hard disk back where it belongs. Again Windows has a tool to help you accomplish this called, coincidentally, Disk Defragmenter.

To run this tool simply click on Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Defragmenter.

Windows 95/98/ME
The defrag tool will open in a small window. From there just select which hard drive you want to defrag and click on “Run”. This process can take several hours to complete. If defrag keeps pausing or restarting then restart your PC in Safe Mode and defrag from there to get around this problem.

Windows 2000/XP
With this newer version of defrag you can choose to either defrag the drive straight away or allow it to analyze the drive first. I’d recommend that you do the analysis as it only takes a few minutes and it will show you just how badly your drive is fragmented. Once the analysis is complete simply click on “Defragment”. Again defragmenting is a time intensive process and you’re best to leave your PC uninterrupted whilst it’s doing this. Catch up on a good book maybe

Norton Systemworks has a great defragmentation tool called Speed Disk which I love because it does such a thorough job on my hard drives and has been doing so for the last 10 years.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 15th, 2006 at 11:39 am and is filed under Home Office Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.